Tom Corringham

Dr. Tom Corringham joined the Center For Western Weather and Water Extremes as a Post-Doctoral Scholar in July of 2018 after completing his PhD in Economics at the University of California San Diego, under advisors Richard Carson and Dan Cayan.

At UCSD, Tom worked with LeRoy Westerling, now at UC Merced, and Barbara Morehouse at the University of Arizona, to determine the value of climate forecasts and information in wildland fire management in the western United States. With Dan Cayan, Tom studied the effect of El Niño on flood damages, finding that known large-scale hydrologic effects of ENSO variability largely carried over to economic impacts of damaging flood events in the western US.

Tom is currently working with Dan Cayan, Sasha Gershunov, and Marty Ralph to assess the costs of atmospheric rivers in terms of damaging floods in the western US, using data from the National Flood Insurance Program. Preliminary results suggest that atmospheric rivers are responsible for a significant proportion of total flood damages in the western US, with individual events causing over $1b in damages approximately once every five to ten years over the past 40 years.

At CW3E, Tom will be studying the economic impacts of extreme climate events in California and the western US. He intends to broaden his research to explore the economic aspects of AR forecasts in the context of water management and Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations (FIRO). He is also interested in climate impacts on agriculture, energy, human health, and ecosystem management.