Andrew Kruczkiewicz
Senior Staff Associate
Biography
Andrew Kruczkiewicz has more than 10 years of experience working with the humanitarian, development and disaster management sectors, including Red Cross, World Food Programme and World Bank. He helps design early-warning systems, impact-based forecasting standard operating procedures and contributes to the design of global climate policy. Andrew conducts research on extreme weather and climate events focusing on both individual hazards, such as cyclones, floods and other hydrometeorological hazards, as well as compound events. He is involved in the application of climate and weather data including forecasting, risk assessment and integration within policy and decision making. Andrew is Principal Investigator of NASA funded research project: Towards A Global Flood & Flash Flood Early Warning Early Action System Driven by NASA Earth Observations, which seeks to increase the ability to forecast various types of floods, including flash floods, and inform early warning and early action standard operating procedures.
He is faculty lecturer in the Columbia Climate School’s Climate and Society graduate program and is Co-Director of the Climate School Network: Sustainable and Resilient Living in an Era of Increasing Disasters.
Andrew serves on numerous national and international task forces and committees, including the World Meteorological Organization Task Team on ENSO Information, and the UN OCHA IASC Early Warning Analysis Cell. He frequently appears on national and international television, radio, and in print.
Research Interests
Kruczkiewicz is interested in the role of satellites and remote sensing technology and data for sector-specific applications, specifically the development and assessment of algorithms to detect and map spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation, temperature and other climatic and geophysical variables. This includes analyzing their impact on infrastructure, public health and agriculture, on different timescales, to increase the understanding of risk for decision making.
He is also interested in the intersection of the social and physical sciences, especially pertaining to the integration of remote sensing into early warning systems for extreme events such as floods, storm surge from tropical cyclones, wildfires and landslides to inform preparedness actions and risk assessment within the humanitarian sector. An overarching interest of Andrew’s is exploring how to best communicate uncertainty found within climate and weather impact-based projections and forecasts to decision makers in the humanitarian sector at sub-national, national and global scales.
Role at the IRI
Andrew is Principal Investigator on NASA Grant #80NSSC18K0342, Towards a Global Flood & Flash Food Early Warning Early Action System Driven by NASA Earth Observations and Hydrologic Models and Co-PI on NASA Grant #80NSSC18K1693: COMPAS: Connecting Earth Observations to Decision Makers for Preparedness Action in the Rohingya Refugee Camps. Andrew is Co-lead for the UN Inter Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Standard Operating Procedures for El Nino and La Nina Episodes and is on the advisory board for the African Risk Capacity River Flood Model.