2022 Hurricane & Extreme Weather Media Briefing

BATON ROUGE – In preparation for hurricane season, members of the media are invited to join a virtual briefing with four leading experts in climatology, extreme weather events including hurricanes, tropical cyclones and flooding as well as hazard-resistant construction and mitigation on Tuesday, May 31 from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. CDT. To receive the Zoom link and password to attend, email Michelle Spielman at mspielm@lsu.edu. 

LSU has the foremost extreme weather phenomena experts in the world who are available to provide context, insight and analysis for reporters in their on-going coverage of hurricanes, cyclones, heavy rain events, wildfires and other extremes as well as forecasting and trends.

The LSU experts on this media briefing will include:

 

Barry Keim serves as the Louisiana State Climatologist and is the Richard J. Russell Professor in the LSU Department of Geography & Anthropology in the College of Humanities & Social Sciences. His research focuses on climatic extremes with particular emphasis on heavy rainfall, hurricanes, storm surge and the interpretation of climate data. As state climatologist, Keim conducts climatic research on the state of Louisiana and the broader region and serves the community by providing climatic data to those in need, including researchers, government agencies, police departments and the media. He also oversees the group at LSU that manages the world’s largest and most comprehensive database of global storm surges. 

 

 

 

 

Jill Trepanier studies extreme climatic and weather phenomena, specifically tropical cyclones. She uses quantitative methods such as statistics to analyze these events. She and colleague Paul Miller developed a new computational model that analyzes atmospheric temperatures in spring to better forecast hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer. She is an associate professor in the LSU Department of Geography & Anthropology in the College of Humanities & Social Sciences. Her current research interests include understanding extreme weather events, tropical climatology, climate change, geographic information systems, risk assessment and statistical methods. 

 

 

 

 

Paul Miller is an assistant professor of coastal meteorology in the LSU Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences. In addition to supervising the LSU Coastal Meteorology Lab, his current work examines hurricane-related impacts such as flooding and landscape change, as well as thunderstorm drivers in the Southeast U.S. and Caribbean. Miller’s research has documented lingering changes to heat indices, precipitation and streamflow for several months following strong hurricane landfalls. Beyond research, he also provides real-time operational forecasting support for the Coastal Emergency Risks Assessment, or CERA, storm surge prediction suite.  

 

 

 

 

Carol Friedland is the LSU AgCenter LaHouse Resource Center director and associate professor in Biological and Agricultural Engineering. Her research focuses on resilient and sustainable housing, disaster loss estimation, post-disaster damage assessment, hazard mitigation planning and mitigation decision-making. Her areas of expertise include: hazard-resistant construction and mitigation; performance of housing and other built infrastructure subjected to natural hazards; combined wind and flood interactions on structures; post-event data acquisition; remote sensing of building damage; hazard-resistant and sustainable construction; integration of Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, in hazards research; hazard mitigation planning and mitigation decision-making; and loss estimation. LaHouse Resource Center is a research-based educational demonstration facility for resilient, sustainable and healthy housing: 

http://www.lsuagcenter.com/lahouse.