CEVE 543: Hydroclimate Hazard and Extremes
Rice University, Fall 2026
This is a draft of the Fall 2026 course website. Content, dates, and policies will change before the semester begins.
Engineering design, financial risk management, and emergency management protocols all rest on estimates of the frequency, severity, and duration of weather and climate extremes. In this course, you will learn to apply tools from statistics, hydrology, and climate science to answer questions like:
- How often does a wind gust at a given facility exceed its design threshold, and is that frequency changing?
- What is the distribution of expected annual flood loss for a portfolio spread across a large region?
- How extreme could rainfall over the Houston metropolitan area be in the next 50 years?
Most of all, you will learn to identify the assumptions each method rests on, judge how they affect the validity of a result, and explain your conclusions to technical and non-technical audiences.
Logistics
- Instructor: James Doss-Gollin
- Email: jdossgollin@rice.edu
- Office: Ryon 215
- Meetings: MWF, 1:00-1:50 pm
- Canvas: https://canvas.rice.edu/courses/92734
Course objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Frame an engineering or financial decision as a risk analysis problem, identifying the scales, processes, and quantities that have to be estimated.
- Implement extreme value models, time series analysis, regional pooling, and event set generation to quantify the probability distribution of decision-relevant intensity measures, and propagate parameter and sampling uncertainty through to the answer.
- Choose appropriate methods for a given problem, defend those choices, and communicate their assumptions and limitations to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Use (and choose not to use) AI tools appropriately and responsibly in support of (i) achieving learning objectives and (ii) analyzing hydroclimate hazard.
Organization
The course is organized into three modules.
| Module | Weeks | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| Foundations | 1-3 | Risk framing, Monte Carlo, exceedance-probability curves, time-series diagnostics, the bootstrap |
| Univariate extremes | 4-8 | Extreme value theory, peaks over threshold, nonstationarity, regional frequency analysis, model selection |
| Spatiotemporal extremes | 9-14 | Copulas, storm transposition, downscaling and bias correction, weather typing, climate-informed generators |
| Synthesis | 15 |
Each week follows a regular rhythm; departures from it are noted in the course schedule.
| Day | How to prepare | What we will do |
|---|---|---|
| Mondays | Read assigned lecture notes or textbook and submit any questions | Lecture on foundations |
| Wednesdays | Do assigned practice problems (analytical or computational) | Work practice problems; lecture on applications |
| Fridays | Review Monday + Wednesday material | Oral exam for 2-3 students; other students are excused |
Credit
The layout for this site was inspired by and draws from Vivek Srikrishnan’s Environmental Systems Analysis course at Cornell, STA 210 at Duke University, and Andrew Heiss’s course materials at Georgia State.