Dr Renato Vitolo is the Willis Research Fellow in the Exeter Climate Systems group, led by Prof David Stephenson at the University of Exeter. Dr Vitolo’s main field of expertise is climate risk, with a keen interest in applications to the insurance industry. His main research topic within the core programme of  the WRN (Willis Research Network) is the clustering of windstorms, hurricanes, floods and extreme events. His research work is strongly multidisciplinary, bringing together ideas from statistical modelling (e.g. extreme value theory), atmospheric physics and complex behaviour in nonlinear dynamical systems.

In the framework of the WRN, Dr Vitolo has ongoing collaborations with the University of Reading for a project on  using Global Climate Model output to develop event sets for tropical cyclone risk assessment and with the Universities of Princeton, Newcastle and Bologna for the study of spatiotemporal properties of floods (spatial dependence and decadal to multidecadal variability).

Dr Vitolo is:

• principal investigator of the Exeter-led PREDEX project, involving the University of Groningen (NL), concerning the predictability of extreme atmospheric events;
• co-investigator in the Exeter-led RACEWIN project, which aims to understand how windstorm clustering and the  relationship between storm-related wind and precipitation extremes might change in the future;
• co-investigator in the TEMPEST project led by Reading University, which aims to provide an improved understanding of how climate change and natural variability will affect the generation and evolution of extra-tropical cyclones (windstorms).

Other research interests include the problem of General Atmospheric Circulation, atmospheric low-frequency variability in the Northern Hemisphere, bifurcations, resonances and the statistics of extremes in chaotic dynamical systems.