Preliminary Work on the Prediction of Extreme Rainfall Events and Flood Events in Australia Prepared by Kevin Fergusson Presented to the Actuaries Institute General Insurance Seminar 13 – 15 November 2016 Melbourne This paper has been prepared for the Actuaries Institute 2016 General Insurance Seminar. The Institute’s Council wishes it to be understood that opinions put forward herein are not necessarily those of the Institute and the Council is not responsible for those opinions. Kevin Fergusson, Centre for Actuarial Studies, University of Melbourne The Institute will ensure that all reproductions of the paper acknowledge the author(s) and include the above copyright statement. Institute of Actuaries of Australia ABN 69 000 423 656 Level 2, 50 Carrington Street, Sydney NSW Australia 2000 t +61 (0) 2 9239 6100 f +61 (0) 2 9239 6170 e
[email protected] w www.actuaries.asn.au Preliminary Work on the Prediction of Extreme Rainfall Events and Flood Events in Australia K. Fergusson Centre for Actuarial Studies The University of Melbourne 15th November 2016 Abstract Among many scientific discoveries over the centuries, the pioneering work in Richardson [1922] has provided the mathematical theory of weather forecasting used today. The subsequent technological advances of high speed computers have allowed Richardson’s work to be exploited by modern day meteorological teams who coordinate their efforts globally to predict weather patterns on Earth, particularly extreme weather events such as floods. This paper describes preliminary work in applying some known predictors of rainfall in Australia to forecasting extreme rainfall events and linking these to flood events. Keywords: Floods, rainfall intensity-frequency-duration curves, sunspot numbers, El Nino-Southern Oscillation, Southern Oscillation Index, Indian Ocean Dipole, Southern Annular Mode, Madden-Julian Oscillation, regression trees, bootstrapped aggregation.