Climate Hub Rio and Columbia Professor Suzana Camargo join forces with the Municipality of Rio to improve the accuracy of rainfall forecasting

Professor Suzana J. Camargo, PhD, the Marie Tharp Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, visited Brazil recently to advance her research on forecasting extreme weather events in Brazilian megacities. Professor Camargo is among the world’s top experts in climate change, with an extensive list of more than 150 publications dealing with the relationship between climate change and tropical cyclones and climate in various time-scales.

Professor Camargo, who is originally from Brazil, came to Rio with the support of a partnership between the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro and Climate Hub Rio, a project of Columbia Global Center Rio specialized in climate issues.

During her visit to the Rio Resilience Center (COR), Professor Camargo met with the municipality’s climate resilience team and lectured on the possibility of implementing a new mathematical tool to help the city protect against violent rainfall. The tool, which is still under development, aims to improve the precision and timing of rainfall forecasts especially by forecasting the precise locations and the exact moments in time with highest rainfall concentration. By using this model-based system, the Resilience Center might better be able to anticipate dangerous weather events and, as a result, be prepared to act locally in each neighborhood to mitigate the impact of rainstorms.

Professor Camargo's project also includes students from renowned Brazilian universities, including the University of Sao Paulo (USP) and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), as part of an international collaboration to promote customized approaches and strategies to fight local climate challenges. The participants help with both developing the forecasting tool and supplying data about the city’s geographical characteristics. During her visit to Rio, Professor Camargo also took part in a seminar at the UFRJ with meteorology students. 

"Making accurate predictions, measurements, and simulations of how a climate event might occur is a complex scientific problem. This is what we are trying to improve with this project, supported by the Climate Hub Rio, in collaboration with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The students are conducting research focused on issues here in Brazilian cities, such as simulating extreme rainfall events in Rio, for example", said Camargo in an interview with Brazilian newspaper O Globo.

“This is important for a city like Rio de Janeiro, where you can find seacoast, mountainous regions, and lowlands all in one place. It is a first step. We are combining academic knowledge and operational needs to provide safety and comfort to the inhabitants of Rio. It was a meeting to kickstart collaborative projects aimed at improving efficiency, safety and avoiding casualties that happen as a result of extreme meteorological events”, added Prof. Ana Nunes, from the Department of Meteorology at UFRJ.

Professor Camargo’s activities in the city also included a meeting with Tatiana Castelo Branco, coordinator for climate change at the Secretariat for the Environment and Climate of Rio de Janeiro They discussed the Municipality’s ongoing projects regarding preparation for extreme events. The main focus of their conversation was the operation of a “Heat Observatory” in the vulnerable favela community of Maré. The Heat Observatory has been developed in collaboration with the NGO Voz das Comunidades. Staff will place thermal sensors to monitor climate warming in the neighborhood, which is one of the poorest in the city as well as one of the most dense. Other Columbia professors are working with Professor Camargo with a particular focus on urban heat islands.