Water Economics and Politics Seminar Series
/ Climate change and water resources management

Drought and heat: Performance of seasonal predictions on global and regional scales

Speaker: Prof. Dr Harald Kunstmann | Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany 

Moderator: Prof. Djiby Thiam | Director: WPE – Water and Production Economics, University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa

Time: 16:00 South African Standard Time (SAST) | GMT +2

Topic: Seasonal predictions offer an increasingly important basis for anticipating hydrometeorological extremes such as droughts and heatwaves, whose frequency and intensity have risen markedly due to global warming. They allow probabilistic information about expected wet-dry and hot-cold anomalies several months ahead. The presentation examines the performance of the ECMWF SEAS5-based seasonal forecasting system on global and regional scales, particularly in Africa. Raw SEAS5 forecasts suffer from substantial model biases and lead‑dependent drift. The presentation shows how these limitations are currently addressed by statistical postprocessing and AI-based approaches. Results underscore that bias‑corrected seasonal forecasts can provide actionable, probabilistic information for climate‑resilient decision‑making in the water sector across diverse climatic regions.

Register to attend

Harald Kunstmann

About the speaker: Prof. Dr Harald Kunstmann earned his doctorate at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) after studying physics in Marburg (Germany), Virginia (USA), and Heidelberg (Germany), and conducted research at the University of Bloemfontein in South Africa and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. He is the deputy director of the Campus Alpin of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and has held the Chair of Regional Climate and Hydrology at the University of Augsburg since 2009. Since 2021, he has also been the founding director of the new Center for Climate Resilience there. His field of research is the impact of climate change on the water cycle. He works not only in regions of Germany and Europe, but also in the Global South, particularly in various regions of Africa. He is leading international projects on hydrology and climate-smart agriculture and on improved seasonal forecasts in Africa. In 2021, he was awarded the Water Resources Prize of the Rüdiger Kurt Bode Foundation in the Stifterverband für die Wissenschaft, and in March 2024, he received the German Hydrology Prize from the German Hydrological Society.

Seminar format:

  • Live online session on Microsoft Teams
  • Duration: 1 hour
  • Live presentation with Q&A session

Who should attend: This series is open to students and faculty from academic institutions across South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, policymakers, engineering and technical professionals, advocacy groups, NGO staff, and anyone with a keen interest in water economics and policy.

The UCT-UCR Seminar Series

This seminar is part of the UCT-UCR Seminar Series: Water Economics and Politics, a collaboration between the University of Cape Town (UCT) and University of California, Riverside (UCR). Subscribe to our mailing list to receive updates on upcoming sessions.

Subscribe