* Friday, June 27th, 2013 * 11 h c.t. * LRZ lecture hall Abstract: CIMA Research Foundation is a private non-profit research organization. It s committed to promote the scientific research, technological development and higher education in engineering and environmental sciences in order to improve civil protection, public health and preservation of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. CIMA's founding Institutions are the National Civil Protection Department of Italy, the University of Genoa, and local Authorities. The mission Foundation has got from the founders is to observe the Earth relevant processes, to predict the scenarios generated by them, using science in the service of the protection of citizens and of the environment. The speech will address first the research needs and the innovative tools of a modern Civil Protection Agency, in the field of meteorological and hydrological hazards, in order to efficiently predict dangerous events. The implications of the climate change on predicting climatic extremes will be discussed: exchanging the space dimension with the time dimension in observing and modeling is the main reason of the DRIHM project and of the EXPRESS-HYDRO project. The advanced modeling of the weather impacts, as well as the brain observation and its dynamic modeling, are the two modern science fields in which field experts are more in need of the support from ICT research. Biography: Prof. Franco Siccardi is current President of CIMA Research Foundation * Past Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Genoa Expert in methods for reducing the effects of natural hazards - especially flooding - through weather forecasting, observing networks and satellite sensors. * Sergey Soloviev Medal of the European Geophysical Society of the year 2000 for the outstanding scientific contributions in the area of understanding and mitigation of natural hazards impact. From 1995 to 2001 and from 2006 to present appointed by the Office of the Prime Minister of Italy as member of the National Committee for Extreme Risks. * Presently coordinator of hydrometeo risk section of the committee. Since 1986 to 2005 leader of the research area on Strategies for the Mitigation of Natural Hazards Effects of the Italian Research Group for the Prevention of Hydrogeological Hazards. * From 2004 to 2011 principal investigator of the Opera Project, the Italian Space Agency research and demonstration program for the use of EO data in risk assessment and flood predictions. Since 2011 member of the OCSE expert group on the Global Risk Modeling initiative. Up to 2007 Chairman of Business Consortium COS (OT) Technology for the Earth Observation from Space. Since 2007 President of the Research Foundation Centre for Environmental Modeling (CIMA). This information is also available on our web server http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/aktuell/ali4596/ Ludger Palm