New COST Action DAMOCLES approved

On 13 April 2018 the COST Committee of Senior Officials has approved the COST Action UnDerstanding And Modeling cOmpound CLimate and weather EventS, in short, DAMOCLES. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which outlines the planned activities, went online today. COST Actions are flexible, fast, effective and efficient networking instruments to cooperate and coordinate nationally funded research activities. COST Actions are open to anyone interested in the topic. From the kick-off, DAMOCLES will run for four years and fund meetings, conferences, training schools, and, maybe most importantly, short-term scientific missions.

Five Working Groups will coordinate the different activities related to compound event research:

1. 1. Synthesis and analysis framework
   2. Stakeholder involvement and science-user interface
   3. A meta-database of impact data
   4. New statistical approaches for model development and evaluation
   5. Realistic model simulations for specific event types

The main goals of DAMOCLES are to

• identify key process and variable combinations underpinning compound events
• describe the available statistical methods for modelling dependence in time, space, and between multiple variables
• identify data requirements needed to document, understand, and simulate compound events
• propose an analysis framework to improve the assessment of compound events

DAMOCLES will bring together climate scientists, impact modellers, engineers, statisticians, and stakeholders to coordinate research on compound events. We hope that this will lead to a major breakthrough in future risk assessments.