The next appointment in the PhDTalks seminar series will take place on Wednesday, April 15th, 2026, in Grandori Room (Building 4), from 12:00 to 13:00 CET.

PhDTalks is a series of seminars and discussions among PhD candidates. The events aim to provide a space for networking among doctoral students and for engaging with the many projects developed within our department.

The speaker Ana Maria Rotaru will deliver a seminar entitled “Accounting for spatial dependence in flood hazard assessment at basin scale”

At the end of the event, a light refreshment will be offered, sponsored by the department.

The seminar will also be accessible online at the following link.

Abstract
Flood hazard assessments at basin scale often rely on simplified representations of extreme events, assuming that the same level of severity occurs across the entire catchment. This assumption rarely holds in reality, and the resulting flood maps correspond to longer return period than intended.
This work explicitly characterizes the spatial dependence of flood-generating extremes in producing hazard maps within the Lambro River basin. A conditional extreme value framework is used to model the dependence structure of precipitation and generate a large ensemble of scenarios, each sharing the same joint return period at the basin scale but with varying return periods across sub-catchments. The rainfall scenarios drive 2D hydrodynamic simulations, producing a set of flood maps that can be synthesized into probabilistic hazard maps.
The findings demonstrate that accounting for spatial dependence returns a richer depiction of the flood hazard compared to the current practice.

Speaker’s Bio
Ana Maria is a third-year PhD candidate in Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering at DICA. She is currently spending her visiting period at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. She holds a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering for Risk Mitigation from Politecnico di Milano.