GWS: Impact

Impact

The methods we develop are not abstractions. They describe how precipitation extremes cluster, how flood risk accumulates across portfolios, how drought sequences propagate through water systems — and how to quantify all of this under deep uncertainty.

Two decades of research has produced tools that are deployed and papers that are cited. The Institute at TUHH is the platform from which this programme now builds its applied and industrial partnerships. Below is the evidence of where our methods reach — and where we are actively building further.

DEPLOYED TOOL

CoSMoS: Complete Stochastic Modelling System

CoSMoS is an award-winning open-source R package that generates realistic synthetic time series and spatial fields of any hydroclimatic variable (precipitation, streamflow, wind speed, humidity) in seconds. You define the statistical properties you need — CoSMoS produces the ensemble.

Univariate, multivariate, and random field simulation of any hydroclimatic variable
Preserves marginal distributions, correlation structure, and intermittency across scales
Space-time storm simulation including advection from local rainfall to cyclone-scale fields

Maintained by TycheLab — Papalexiou, Serinaldi, Shook

CRAN GitHub R Vignette

35,000+ downloads on CRAN since 2019

INDUSTRY CONNECTION

Members of the group have sustained long-term engagement with the global insurance and reinsurance sector. For over a decade, a core group researcher held a position funded through the Willis Research Network — a programme connecting academic researchers directly to catastrophe risk modelling practice. This engagement has shaped the group's understanding of how probabilistic hydroclimatic analysis is applied in real-world risk assessment and pricing.

Willis Research Network

Where our methods apply

The following application domains define the sectors where the group's methods have direct and demonstrated relevance. These are the areas where we are actively building partnerships.

Reinsurance and Catastrophe Modelling

Catastrophe models depend on simulated hydroclimatic fields — wind, precipitation, flood — generated at scale, preserving spatial dependence and tail behaviour. CoSMoS was designed for exactly this class of problem. The reinsurance sector applies wind field simulation, copula- based dependence models, and stochastic precipitation ensembles in portfolio risk and pricing: these are the methods our group has developed and continues to advance.

Infrastructure Design and Flood Standards

Designing bridges, drainage systems, and flood defences requires robust estimates of extreme precipitation and streamflow — return levels, IDF curves, uncertainty bounds — across present and future climate conditions. Our methods address the full chain from observational record analysis through nonstationarity and uncertainty quantification to design-event specification under climate change.

Urban Flood Risk and Climate Adaptation

Cities investing in flood adaptation need to know which measures hold up across a range of plausible future conditions, not just under one design storm. Our probabilistic scenario generation and uncertainty quantification methods provide the framework for ensemble-based performance assessment — moving beyond static design events.

Operational Forecasting and Water Utilities

Water utilities and forecasting agencies operating at large scales need tools that are computationally efficient, physically grounded, and calibrated to local conditions. Our stochastic simulation and machine-learning surrogate work addresses ensemble-scale forecasting without the overhead of full physics-based models.

Climate Adaptation Policy and Investment

National and regional adaptation programmes need to translate probabilistic climate projections into actionable investment decisions. Our decision-support frameworks — built on robust decision-making and scenario discovery methods — connect quantified uncertainty to the governance and planning processes where it must become a decision.

Water Governance and International Policy

Where water crosses borders, risk quantification must meet governance reality. Our research connects probabilistic hydrology to water conflict analysis, SDG 6 implementation, and the institutional frameworks that determine how risk information becomes policy.

What we are building at TUHH

The Institute for Global Water Security was established at TUHH in 2025. We are now building the applied and industrial partnerships that connect our research programme to Hamburg's water sector, German and European funders, and the international reinsurance and infrastructure communities. If the application domains above describe problems you face, the Collaborate page describes how we can work together.

Collaborate with us ›

TU Hamburg

Hamburg University of Technology

Global Water Security

Harburger Schloßstraße 22A

21079 Hamburg

E-mail : igws(at)tuhh.de

Phone : +49 40 30601 3207