Dirk Eilander is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam since May 2017. The topic of his PhD research is compound flood risk at the global scale. This research is funded by a NWO VIDI grant and conducted under the supervision of Dr. Philip Ward and Dr. Hessel Winsemius.

Next to his PhD research, Dirk works as hydrologist/researcher in the Catchment and Urban Hydrology department of Deltares, where he focuses on flood and drought risks. He has gained work experience in national and international research and consultancy projects in Indonesia, Africa, the United States and Europe. 

Expertise

Catchment hydrology, hydrodynamics, natural hazards, risk assessments, climate change, adaptation, big data, spatial analysis.

2013: Master Water Management at Delft University of Technology.

2010: Bachelor Civil Engineering at Delft University of Technology.

Globally, floods cause thousands of fatalities and billions of Euros of damage per year. Hence, several global models have been developed to assess the impacts of either river or coastal floods. However, the socioeconomic impacts of flooding in deltas and estuaries are even worse when river and coastal floods coincide, such as during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and the devastating floods in Thailand in 2011. Since current global flood risk models assess either river or coastal flood processes, they cannot be used to examine the influence of such compound river and coastal flood processes on flood risk.

The proposed research fills this knowledge gap. The main objective is to improve our understanding of compound flooding in delta areas and its influence on flood risk. To this end a globally applicable nested flood model will be developed. This model will be used to to understand the effect of compound floods on total flood risk and to characterize compound floods and their meteorological drivers.

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