CREST hosted its second presenter, Dr. Arpita Mondal under its Deliver, Dialogue, Discuss, and Discourse (D4) Series. Dr. Mondal’s presentation focused on deciphering the role of human-induced climate change in flooding in India and its impact. The event was well attended by over fifty international and national participants including CUNY HIRES students, CREST & CCNY students, faculty, management, and virtual guests from India.
Dr. Mondal is an Associate Professor in Civil Engineering at IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India. She is also an associate faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Program in climate studies. Her research focuses on hydroclimatic extremes such as heat waves, floods and droughts – how they can be characterized, what causes them, and how they are likely to evolve with climate change.
The goal of the D4 series is to engage with a community of researchers, educators, policy-makers, government officials and entrepreneurs and to D4 on topics relevant to Earth’s changing Environment & its impact on the society. D4 is facilitated through interactive seminars and workshops. During this second event of the series, Dr. Mondal engaged the audience by highlighting the methods and state-of-art for attributing flooding events to anthropogenic climate change, particularly the Probabilistic Event Attribution (PEA) framework. She also discussed the three approaches that use observations, and physics-based climate and hydrologic model simulations, with specific application on the Kerala floods of 2018. Attendees were curious to learn about the topic and engaged through an insightful Q&A session.
Dr. Mondal greatly appreciated the presentation and her discussions with the attendees. She said, “It was a great pleasure interacting with undergrad and graduate students at CUNY CREST, particularly the 2024 CUNY HIRES cohort. The audience to my talk was largely interdisciplinary and very bright. I received some of the most amazing and thought-provoking questions.”
CUNY HIRES Students sharing their questions with Dr. Mondal
During her visit to the CCNY, Dr. Mondal also interacted with several CREST and CCNY faculty, students, and leadership. She learnt about the advanced research that is being conducted at CREST by its Ph.D. students and other scientists, particularly the flood forecasting project. She looks forward to exploring collaboration opportunities between IIT Bombay and CREST.
Dr. Mondal with CREST Ph.D. students
