Congratulations!Patrick Pieper successfully defended his doctoral thesis

8 December 2020

We are proud to announce the successful disputation of our SICSS member Patrick Pieper.

His dissertation “Meteorological Drought - Universal monitoring and reliable seasonal Prediction" was supervised by Prof. Dr. Johanna Baer, Dr. André Düsterhus and Prof. Dr. Christian Franzke.

Patrick refined the most commonly used index to classify meteorological drought conditions, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). This refinement enables the Index to universally describe and monitor meteorological drought and establishes the formal basis to evaluate SPI predictions. By conditioning SPI predictions on active states of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), he also discovered that seasonal predictions of meteorological drought are reliable in large parts of southern North and northern South America. He noteworthily demonstrates such reliable predictability during the region's dry phases of ENSO, the time at which reliable drought predictions are most valuable. The highlight of his contribution is that it unveils predictability at unprecedented lead times.

Patrick was a member of the Institute of Oceanography at the Universität Hamburg

Patrick's future plans?
Fighting hunger seems to him the next logical step ;)