El Día del Agua y la Atmósfera
2025 Keynote Speaker
Giuseppe Mascaro
Associate Professor
School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment
Arizona State University
Biography:
Giuseppe Mascaro is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University (ASU). His research has the primary goal of quantifying the impacts of global warming on hydrologic processes and infrastructure at local scales, with a focus on extreme precipitation and flooding. Dr. Mascaro has developed creative ways to synergistically combine advanced statistical techniques with physics-based models of the Earth’s climate and hydrologic cycle. He has been involved and taken an essential role in multi-institutional and single-investigator activities funded by federal agencies (NSF, NASA, NOAA, DoE, DoD) and a public utility (SRP) to conduct significant, internationally recognized research.
Dr. Mascaro holds a “Laurea” (B.S. and M.S.) in Civil Engineering and a Ph.D. in Hydrology from the University of Cagliari, Italy, and a Master in Environmental Management from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy. Before joining ASU, he worked in the private sector and as a postdoctoral scientist at New Mexico Tech and the University of Cagliari.
"Recent progress in the characterization of precipitation statistics,
generating mechanisms and trends in the United States"
Characterizing how global warming will impact mean and extreme precipitation (P) is key to supporting water resources management, flood protection, and infrastructure design in current and future conditions. In this talk, I will present our recent progress in two areas that address this need. I will first provide insights into the physical generating mechanisms (GMs) of daily mean and extreme P in the Conterminous United States (CONUS) using records of 2861 gauges from 1980 to 2018, atmospheric reanalyses, and publicly available datasets. The GMs include fronts, extratropical cyclones, atmospheric rivers, tropical cyclones, and North American Monsoon. After illustrating how the climatological occurrence of the GMs varies in space and time across the CONUS, I will present evidence that, at most sites, the dominant GMs generate P values characterized by different statistical distributions. This work provides valuable insights into incorporating mixed populations and nonstationarity in P frequency analyses. In the second part of the talk, I will show evidence that the frequency of heavy P at durations from hourly to daily has been increasing from 1949 to 2020 in most of the CONUS in a way that cannot be explained by natural climate variability. This was done using an updated database of hourly precipitation from 332 gages and a suite of statistical methods. I will also demonstrate that trends in hourly heavy precipitation have mainly emerged after ~2000. The findings of this effort support the climate adaptation of stormwater and flood protection infrastructure.