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March 2, 2020 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200302153615.htm | Putting a price on the protective power of wetlands | In coastal communities prone to hurricanes and tropical storms, people typically turn to engineered solutions for protection: levees, sea walls and the like. But a natural buffer in the form of wetlands may be the more cost-effective solution, according to new research from the University of California San Diego. | In the most comprehensive study of its sort to date, UC San Diego economists show that U.S. counties with more wetlands experienced substantially less property damage from hurricanes and tropical storms over a recent 20-year period than those with fewer wetlands.A major focus of the study is estimating the monetary value of wetlands' property-protecting services. On average, the marginal value of one square kilometer of wetlands is estimated at $1.8 million per year. The study also finds there is considerable spatial variation in the value of wetlands' protective services, with their value in heavily populated areas that are at frequent risk of being hit by major storms often being considerably higher.The paper, titled "Coastal wetlands reduce property damage during tropical cyclones," is published in the Richard Carson, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Economics, is the senior author and recent doctoral alumna Fanglin Sun, now a researcher at Amazon, is the first author."Wetlands play a critical role in helping to reduce property damage from storms. With coastal areas under increasing threat from more powerful storms due to climate change, it's critical to prevent further destruction of existing wetlands," Carson said. "Government should also actively seek to restore wetlands that have been lost."To arrive at their calculations, the co-authors analyzed the effects all tropical cyclones on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts between 1996 and 2016: 88 hurricanes and tropical storms that hit 232 U.S. counties.They worked with precise storm tracks and used highly detailed geo-spatial data -- enabling them to make estimates at not just the county level but down to the neighborhood too -- taking into account a number of factors, including property values and local elevation, as well as building codes. The relative protection from wetlands is greatest, it turns out, in areas with the weakest building codes.They studied freshwater and saltwater wetlands, as well as forested wetlands (or mangroves) and scrub/shrub wetlands. All types of wetlands, they find, contribute significantly to reductions in property damage from storms.The co-authors say their model can be used to estimate property damage both under different climate-change conditions and under different scenarios of wetland loss, too. To illustrate the latter, they apply their model to Hurricane Irma, which made landfall in 2017, just outside the study's sample period. If the 19 Florida counties affected by the storm had not lost 2.8% of their wetland coverage between 1996 and 2016, damage from Irma would have been lower by about $430 million, a significant amount for a single storm.The co-authors hope that the estimates detailed in their PNAS paper are useful for both policymakers and the public alike.They also point out that storm protection for property is just one of the ecological services that wetlands provide. Wetlands also serve as habitat for fish and wildlife, filter industrial, residential and agricultural runoff, support outdoor recreational opportunities and sequester carbon, benefits that were not addressed in this study. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,020 |
February 11, 2020 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200211160514.htm | Storm-induced sea level spikes differ in origin on US east, Gulf coasts | The U.S. East and Gulf Coasts differ in how ocean and atmospheric circulation and sea level interact to produce storm surges, and both regions will experience greater storm surges as global warming progresses, according to new research from a University of Arizona-led team. | The research is the first to compare how different parts of the Atlantic Coast might fare during storms. The scientists examined the impacts of both tropical cyclones, including hurricanes, and extra-tropical cyclones, such as nor'easters.The team did so by using a new global climate computer model that allowed them to combine information on weather, climate and sea level in a fully integrated way.The scientists found that even in the absence of global warming, the Gulf Coast, and especially New Orleans, is particularly vulnerable to storm surge. As the climate warms, the Gulf Coast will be even more susceptible to extreme storm surges, said first author Jianjun Yin, an associate professor of geosciences.More than 60 million people live in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico regions. Between 2000 and 2017, those regions were hit by 13 hurricanes that each caused more than $10 billion in damages.For both regions, storm surge heights will increase in the future as warming progresses, Yin and his colleagues found. Stronger hurricanes will affect the Gulf Coast and increased sea level will affect the East Coast."For the Gulf of Mexico coast, the extreme sea level is highly sensitive to tropical cyclone characteristics like the storm winds. So if the hurricane becomes stronger, there's an elevated storm surge height because the region is highly sensitive to the storm's winds," Yin said."But for the East Coast of the U.S., especially the Northeast coast of the U.S., the story is different -- the maximum storm surge is mainly influenced by the background sea level rise," Yin said.The paper, "Response of Storm-related Extreme Sea Level along the US Atlantic Coast to Combined Weather and Climate Forcing," by Yin and his co-authors is published in the Yin had done previous research on sea level rise using computer climate models and wanted to investigate what scientists call "extreme sea level events" -- big spikes in daily coastal sea level, generally caused by storms.However, previous models could not handle the complex interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere Yin wanted to include, either because the models lacked an integrated approach or were too coarse.New technology, in the form of a new global climate model developed by the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, came to the rescue.By using the new model, GFDL CM4, Yin and his colleagues could incorporate information about tropical and extra-tropical cyclones, atmospheric and oceanic circulation, weather and sea level rise. Having such rich information in the model allowed the team to more accurately predict how the seas along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. would respond to storms.The team studied the coastline from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Houston, Texas.The researchers analyzed several simulations using the model. The control used pre-industrial conditions similar to those in the 1800s. Another simulation added more and more COThe pre-industrial control simulation revealed the underlying differences driving storm surge in the two regions -- wind strength along the Gulf Coast and sea level along the East Coast.The simulation that added CO"For the COIn addition, as CO"AMOC transports a lot of heat northward. It's mainly responsible for the mild climate over Europe," Yin said. "If AMOC slows down, it can influence the weather and climate over Europe and North America and cause regional sea level rise." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,020 |
January 27, 2020 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200127134847.htm | Earth's most biodiverse ecosystems face a perfect storm | A combination of climate change, extreme weather and pressure from local human activity is causing a collapse in global biodiversity and ecosystems across the tropics, new research shows. | The study, published today, mapped over 100 locations where tropical forests and coral reefs have been affected by climate extremes such as hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, droughts and fires. It provides an overview of how these very diverse ecosystems are being threatened by a combination of ongoing climate changes, increasingly extreme weather and damaging local human activities.The international team of researchers argue that only international action to decrease COLead researcher Dr Filipe França from the Embrapa Amazônia Oriental in Brazil and Lancaster University said: "Tropical forests and coral reefs are very important for global biodiversity, so it is extremely worrying that they are increasingly affected by both climate disturbances and human activities.""Many local threats to tropical forests and coral reefs, such as deforestation, overfishing, and pollution, reduce the diversity and functioning of these ecosystems. This in turn can make them less able to withstand or recover from extreme weather. Our research highlights the extent of the damage which is being done to ecosystems and wildlife in the tropics by these interacting threats."Dr Cassandra E. Benkwitt, a marine ecologist from Lancaster University, said: "Climate change is causing more intense and frequent storms and marine heatwaves. For coral reefs, such extreme events reduce live coral cover and cause long-lasting changes to both coral and fish communities, compounding local threats from poor water quality and overfishing. Although the long-term trajectory for reefs will depend on how extreme events interact with these local stressors, even relatively pristine reefs are vulnerable to both climate change and extreme weather."Tropical forest species are also being threatened by the increasing frequency of extreme hurricanes.Dr Guadalupe Peralta from Canterbury University in New Zealand said: "A range of post-hurricane ecological consequences have been recorded in tropical forests: the destruction of plants by these weather extremes affects the animals, birds and insects that rely on them for food and shelter."In some regions, such as the Caribbean Islands, extreme weather events have decimated wildlife, reducing numbers by more than half."We are starting to see another wave of global extinctions of tropical birds as forest fragmentation reduces populations to critical levels," explained Dr Alexander Lees, from Manchester Metropolitan University.The combination of higher temperatures with longer and more severe dry seasons has also led to the spread of unprecedented and large-scale wildfires in tropical forests.Dr Filipe França said that at the end of 2015, Santarém in the Brazilian state of Pará was one of the epicentres of that year's El Niño impacts. "The region experienced a severe drought and extensive forest fires, and I was very sad to see the serious consequences for forest wildlife."The drought also affected the forests ability to recover from the fires. Dung beetles play a vital role in forest recovery by spreading seeds. The study provides novel evidence that this seed spreading activity plummeted in those forests most impacted by the dry conditions during the 2015-2016 El Niño.Coral reefs were also critically damaged by the same El Niño, explains Professor Nick Graham from Lancaster University.He said: "The 2015-16 coral bleaching event was the worst ever recorded, with many locations globally losing vast tracts of valuable corals. Worryingly, these global bleaching events are becoming more frequent due to the rise in ocean temperature from global warming."The last part of the study emphasizes that urgent action and novel conservation strategies are needed to ameliorate the impacts of the multiple threats to tropical forests and coral reefs.Dr Joice Ferreira from Embrapa Amazônia Oriental said: "To achieve successful climate-mitigation strategies, we need 'action-research' approaches that engage local people and institutions and respect the local needs and diverse socio-ecological conditions in the tropics."The scientists caution that managing tropical ecosystems locally may not be enough if we do not tackle global climate change issues.They stress the urgent need for all nations to act together if we really want to conserve tropical forests and coral reefs for future generations. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,020 |
January 23, 2020 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200123152459.htm | How to minimize the impacts of severe weather on wildlife | When Hurricane Irma made landfall in Florida in September 2017, the Category 5 storm offered a team of wildlife researchers a first-ever opportunity to observe behavioral responses of white-tailed deer to an extreme weather event in real time. The data collected are providing crucial new insights for scientists seeking to minimize the impacts of severe weather and climate change on wildlife. | Heather Abernathy, a doctoral student in the College of Natural Resources and Environment, detailed the group's findings in a recent issue of The paper is one outcome from a large, ongoing collaborative study of white-tailed deer population dynamics as well as interactions between white-tailed deer and Florida panther in southwestern Florida by Virginia Tech, the University of Georgia, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.Since 2015, researchers have been monitoring white-tailed deer using GPS collars to track their movements through the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge and the northern management units of Big Cypress National Preserve. As Hurricane Irma made landfall, the team was able to track the movements of individual white-tailed deer in real time utilizing satellite data transmitted from the GPS collars every four hours.Using the data collected during the hurricane, the researchers were able to estimate habitat use and movement rates. "We found that the deer, particularly the female deer, increased their movement rate substantially," said Abernathy, who is in her third year as a student in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation. "We also observed that the deer changed their habitat selection during the storm.""Typically, deer prefer prairie and marshland habitats during the wet season -- those areas have the most prolific forage -- and avoid forests because that is the habitat of their main predator: the Florida panther," continued Abernathy, who has helped coordinate the project and was the lead author of the paper. "During the storm, we observed the inverse: deer avoided those areas, selecting the pine forests at higher elevations. More than half of the animals we tracked left their home range for higher terrain."These findings suggest that animals have the capacity to adapt their behaviors to survive extreme weather events. Since global climate change has the potential to contribute to an increase in flooding, drought, hurricanes, and tsunamis, this research has broad implications for wildlife behavioral mitigation strategies."In a lot of our climate change assessments, we make the assumption that animal behavior is static and that what we observe now is how the animals are going to respond in extreme events, such as hurricanes," Abernathy explained. "What this research demonstrates is that animals have behavioral mechanisms that allow for survival, but those mechanisms aren't going to be observed until the animals are undergoing a significant event."Abernathy's research has local implications as well: because deer seek higher elevations of pine forests during heavy storms, it is essential that land managers and conservationists protect and manage these environments. They could mean the difference between life and death for this key prey species of the endangered Florida panther."Heather has masterfully handled the role as the point of contact for the cooperating agencies and numerous stakeholder groups affiliated with this project," noted Assistant Professor Mike Cherry, Abernathy's advisor. "Many of these groups have passionate opinions about our research, and Heather has interacted with these groups with grace and professionalism. I could not imagine a better spokesperson for our project." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,020 |
January 22, 2020 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200122150021.htm | Sea level rise could reshape the United States, trigger migration inland | When Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Texas coast in 2017, displaced residents flocked inland, trying to rebuild their lives in the disaster's aftermath. Within decades, the same thing could happen at a much larger scale due to rising sea levels, says a new study led by USC Computer Science Assistant Professor Bistra Dilkina. | The study, published in In the US alone, 13 million people could be forced to relocate due to rising sea levels by 2100. As a result, cities throughout the country will grapple with new populations. Effects could include more competition for jobs, increased housing prices, and more pressure on infrastructure networks."Sea level rise will affect every county in the US, including inland areas," said Dilkina, the study's corresponding author, a WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor in computer science at USC and associate director of USC's Center for AI for Society."We hope this research will empower urban planners and local decision-makers to prepare to accept populations displaced by sea-level rise. Our findings indicate that everybody should care about sea-level rise, whether they live on the coast or not. This is a global impact issue."According to the research team, most popular relocation choices will include land-locked cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Denver and Las Vegas. The model also predicts suburban and rural areas in the Midwest will experience disproportionately large influx of people relative to their smaller local populations.Sea-level rise is caused primarily by two factors related to global warming: added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers and the expansion of sea water as it warms. Within just a few decades, hundreds of thousands homes on the US coast will be flooded. In fact, by the end of the century, 6 feet of ocean-level rise would redraw the coastline of southern Florida, parts of North Carolina and Virginia and most of Boston and New Orleans.To predict the trajectory of sea-level rise migration, the researchers took existing projections of rising sea levels and combined this with population projections. Based on migration patterns after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, the team trained machine learning models -- a subset of artificial intelligence -- to predict where people would relocate."We talk about rising sea levels, but the effects go much further than those directly affected on the coasts," said Caleb Robinson, a visiting doctoral researcher from Georgia Tech advised by Dilkina and the study's first author. "We wanted to look not only at who would be displaced, but also where they would go." Dilkina and Robinson worked with co-author Juan Moreno Cruz, an economist and professor at the University of Waterloo.As expected, the researchers found the greatest effects of sea-level rise migration will be felt by inland areas immediately adjacent to the coast, as well as urban areas in the southeast US. But their model also showed more incoming migrants to Houston and Dallas than previous studies, which flagged Austin as the top destination for climate migrants from the southeastern coast.This result, notes the researchers, shows that population movement under climate change will not necessarily follow previously established patterns. In other words: it is not business as usual.Sea-level rise could also reroute people relocating from unaffected areas. Counties surrounding Los Angeles, in particular, could see tens of thousands of migrants whose preferred coastal destinations are now flooded choosing alternative destinations.The results of this study could help city planners and policymakers plan to expand critical infrastructure, from roads to medical services, to ensure the influx of people has a positive impact on local economies and social well-being."When migration occurs naturally, it is a great engine for economic activity and growth," said co-author Juan Moreno Cruz, an economist and professor at the University of Waterloo."But when migration is forced upon people, productivity falls and human and social capital are lost as communities are broken apart. Understanding these migration decisions helps economies and policy makers prepare for what is to come and do as much as possible to make the influx of migration a positive experience that generates positive outcomes." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,020 |
January 2, 2020 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200102143401.htm | Climate change impacted Hurricane Florence's precipitation and size | A study led by Kevin Reed, PhD, Assistant Professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) at Stony Brook University, and published in | Previous research has suggested that human influences such as emission of greenhouse gasses that alter climate does affect precipitation in extreme storms. The research in this study, however, is a first to use a "forecast attribution" framework that enables scientists to investigate the effect of climate change on individual storm events days in advance.Changes in extreme weather are one of the most serious ways society experiences the impact of climate change. Severe weather and natural disasters account for much damage and has a major economic impact on countries. Reed and colleagues nationally are investigating ways to better forecast extreme storms in the context of climate change.In 2018, prior to the landfall of Hurricane Florence, Reed and colleagues made predictions based on simulations of the storm given climate change models. They predicted Hurricane Florence would be slightly more intense for a longer portion of the forecast period, rainfall amounts over the Carolinas would be increased by 50 percent due to climate change and warmer water temperatures, and the hurricane would be approximately 80 kilometers larger due to the effect of climate change on the large-scale environment around the storm."With our ability for additional 'hindsight' numerical modeling of the storm around climate change factors, we found predictions about increases in storm size and increased storm rainfall in certain areas to be accurate, even if the numbers and proportions are not exact," explains Reed. "More importantly, this post-storm modeling around climate change illustrates that the impact of climate change on storms is here now and is not something only projected for our future."He said that while the post-storm analysis did show that the storm was slightly more intense during the forecast period due to climate change -- as they predicted -- as measured by minimum surface pressure and near-surface winds, the finding remains the most uncertain from the hindsight model.One key finding of the post-storm model showed that Hurricane Florence was about nine kilometers larger in mean maximum diameter due to climate change. Additionally, rainfall amounts over large ranges were significantly increased. Mean total overland rainfall amounts associated with the forecasted storm's core were increased by 4.9 ± 4.6% with local maximum amounts experiencing increases of 3.8 ± 5.7% due to climate change.Reed emphasizes that by attributing climate change effects to individual storms, as his team did with Hurricane Florence, scientists are better able to communicate the direct impacts of climate change on extreme weather to the public.The research is supported in part by the Stony Brook Foundation, National Science Foundation through the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,020 |
December 18, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191218153423.htm | Human management helps rare plants, butterflies survive hurricane | A new study from North Carolina State University shows that ongoing habitat management could help prevent hurricane-driven extinctions. The study found that a rare Florida plant, the pineland croton, weathered the damage from Hurricane Irma better in plots that were under human management than those left alone. The work could have implications for management of rare species in the face of extreme conditions. | Pineland croton is a perennial shrub found in the pine rockland forests of south Florida. This rare plant requires fire to survive, and is the only host plant for two species of endangered butterfly -- Bartram's scrub-hairstreak and the Florida leafwing. Without croton, the butterflies will go extinct."It may seem strange to associate fire with places like the Everglades and Florida Keys, but these plants flourish in rocky, dry areas that aren't usually seasonally flooded," says Erica Henry, postdoctoral researcher at NC State and first author of a paper describing the work. "Historically, pine rocklands burned frequently, and the croton seems to both seed and re-sprout following fire. But in the Keys particularly, using fire to maintain these habitats isn't possible due to human development."Henry was initially interested in determining the most effective means of managing croton populations in Everglades National Park and the National Key Deer Refuge on Big Pine Key. However, in 2017 Hurricane Irma struck Florida and created another opportunity for research."We had been looking at managed and non-managed plots in both locations -- the Everglades and the Keys -- since 2015," Henry says. "Our initial focus was on the difference between mechanical understory removal and/or controlled burns versus nonmanagement, but Irma gave us the opportunity to see if any sort of human management helped recovery in the aftermath of a natural disaster."Prior to the storm, Henry found that croton populations with consistent fire management in Everglades National Park were stable, whereas those on Big Pine Key that hadn't been burned in 15 years were declining at a rate of 20% per year. "This is a fast rate of decline and causes real problems for the butterflies that depend on these plants," Henry says.Henry resampled plants from both sites 10 months after Irma. The two locations experienced differing effects from Irma: the Keys suffered from storm surge and wind gusts up to 160 mph, while the Everglades were not overwashed and experienced wind gusts up to 100 mph. Plant survival in both locations was much higher in managed plots than in unmanaged plots, but being outside Irma's eyewall meant plants in the Everglades did better overall."The hurricane was especially bad on Big Pine Key," Henry says. "Areas on the Key that hadn't been managed suffered the most, but the habitat management seemed to help."The endangered butterfly, Bartram's scrub-hairstreak -- whose numbers were declining prior to Irma -- hasn't been seen on Big Pine Key since, but are still present in the Everglades National Park. Henry hopes the research will give park and land management officials strategies to harden habitats against natural disasters."It seems that even in extreme conditions best practices remain best practices," Henry says. "The pine rockland habitat depends on human management. In areas where that doesn't happen, we lose species and biodiversity. Management gives these habitats a better chance for survival in an era of rapid change."The research appears in | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
December 17, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191217141541.htm | Applying physics principle yields grim prediction on hurricane destruction in era of global warming | Global warming could lead to hurricanes even more powerful than meteorologists currently forecast. That warning came from a physicist researching the behavior of tropical cyclones who noticed that one of the principles of physics -- phase transition -- did not appear in the scientific literature of meteorology. | Edward Wolf, professor emeritus at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, examined the most robust data sets on tropical hurricanes -- compiled by noted atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel in 2006 on Atlantic storms dating as far back as the 1930s off the coast of Africa. In a paper published recently in the journal "This approach indicates the destructive power of Atlantic hurricanes off Africa could reach three times their current level if water temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius -- well within the range that scientists predict is likely by the year 2100," Wolf said. "The same calculations would apply to any tropical basin on Earth, and I am working with Dr. Emanuel now to explore this new concept in the hope that it will advance scientists' predictive ability."The journal paper showed how Wolf's calculations aligned with what has become accepted science: Hurricanes require a surface water temperature above 26.5 degrees Celsius (79.7 degrees Fahrenheit). And every plot of Emanuel's graph of his power dissipation index values-versus-ocean temperature substantiated Wolf's initial suspicion that phase transitions -- such as the transition from water to vapor -- indicate just how much kinetic energy is released as the water that was turned to vapor by a hurricane then cools and falls to Earth as liquid. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
December 7, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191207073539.htm | Closing critical gap in weather forecasting | Scientists working on the next frontier of weather forecasting are hoping that weather conditions 3-to-4 weeks out will soon be as readily available as seven-day forecasts. Having this type of weather information -- called subseasonal forecasts -- in the hands of the public and emergency managers can provide the critical lead time necessary to prepare for natural hazards like heat waves or the next polar vortex. | Scientists like University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science Professor Ben Kirtman and Assistant Professor Kathleen Pegion at George Mason University are leading the way to close this critical gap in the weather forecast system through the SubX project. SubX -- short for The Subseasonal Experiment -- is a research-to-operations project to provide better subseasonal forecasts to the National Weather Service."Subseasonal predictions is the most difficult timeframe to predict," said Kirtman, a professor of atmospheric sciences and director of the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS). "The hardest part is taking all the observations and putting them into the model."SubX is filling the gap between the prediction of weather and the prediction of seasonal conditions, which is guided by slowly evolving ocean conditions like sea surface temperatures and soil moisture and variability in the climate system that work on time scales of weeks. To get to the subseasonal scale, scientists need information on conditions that affects global weather such as large-scale convective anomalies like the Madden-Julian Oscillation in the tropical Indian Ocean into their computer models."The SubX public database makes 3-4 week forecasts available right now and provides researchers the data infrastructure to investigate how to make them even better in the future," said Pegion.SubX has already shown great promise forecasting weather conditions. It accurately predicted the amount of rainfall from Hurricane Michael -- roughly 50 mm, the 4th of July heat wave in Alaska where temperatures reached over 90 degrees Fahrenheit -- 20 to 30 degrees above average in some locations -- and the polar vortex that hit the midwestern U.S. and eastern Canada in late January and killed 22 people.For Kirtman and his team, the power to make these predictions requires the capacity to compute and store a large amount of data. This means they depend heavily on the UM Center for Computational Science's (CCS) computing capability to handle the complex computation needed for their models. CCS resources are critical for Kirtman and Pegion to meet the on-time, in-real-time, all-the-time deadlines required for SubX to be successful.SubX's publicly available database contains 17 years of historical reforecasts (1999-2015) and more than 18 months of real-time forecasts for use by the research community and the National Weather Service.As Kirtman and his research team pointed out in an Oct. 2019 article in the American Meteorological Society's journal | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
December 5, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191205130542.htm | Damaging rains from hurricanes more intense after winds begin to subside | Howling wind drives torrential rain sideways as tall, slender palms bow and tree limbs snap. A hurricane approaches, its gale-force winds wreaking havoc as it nears the coast. Storm surges combine with the downpour, inundating the area with water. | But according to new research out of UC Santa Barbara, the rains that come once the storm has weakened may actually be more intense than when the storm is at its strongest."The highest intensities of rainfall occur after the hurricanes have weakened to tropical storms, not when they first make landfall as major hurricanes," said lead author Danielle Touma, a postdoctoral scholar at the university's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. The study appears in the journal The finding has counterintuitive implications. "If we're thinking about risks, we know that major hurricanes can drive storm surges, there's strong winds and so on. But this paper is also saying hurricanes are still dangerous even after they've weakened to tropical storms," said coauthor Samantha Stevenson, an assistant professor at Bren.Around the time Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, Touma was developing a new method for studying areas and intensities of rainfall around tropical cyclones -- which include hurricanes and tropical storms -- based on weather station data. Many previous studies have used satellite and radar data, but these records are limited to the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In contrast, records from weather stations begin in 1900. Using the measurements from the stations, Touma could calculate the extent of land that experienced rain from a given weather system, as well as how much rain fell.These issues were in sharp focus during the 2017 hurricane season, especially as flooding in Southern Texas racked up roughly $130 billion in damages, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Analyzing decades of records, Touma discovered that the accompanying rainfall tended to be more severe after a hurricane had abated to the category of a tropical storm. In that sense, the cyclones were more dangerous after they had subsided, in spite of their slower wind speeds."You might think hurricanes are most dangerous when they're strongest, because that's when the winds are whipping around the fastest," Stevenson said, "but this paper actually finds that the risk due to extreme rainfall is largest after the hurricane has weakened a bit."Tropical cyclones tend to slow down once they hit land because they are cut off from their energy source, the ocean. There's no longer warm water evaporating below them to drive the convection that fuels the system. As a result, the cyclone becomes disorganized and spins at lower speeds, causing it to spread out. "Now it's kind of parked in one spot, and it can just dump a lot of rain on a particular location," Stevenson explained.Naturally, this effect is most pronounced for cyclones that started as major hurricanes. A smaller cyclone would follow the same pattern -- hit land, slow down and spread out -- but it wouldn't contain the sheer volume of water to cause the same degree of damage.Scientists predict that the intensity of tropical cyclone rainfall will increase as global temperatures rise. In fact, the team has already begun to see this trend in their historical data."Since our analysis used longer records than previous studies, we were better able to detect long-term trends," Stevenson explained. "What this paper adds to the conversation is which types of storms we have to pay more attention to in disaster preparedness plans." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
November 26, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191126092720.htm | Prayers can crowd out donations for disaster victims | People who offer prayers for victims of natural disasters may be less likely to donate to those victims, according to research by a University of Wyoming economist. | Linda Thunstrom, an assistant professor in the UW College of Business' Department of Economics, led the groundbreaking research to shed light on the controversial topic of the value of "thoughts and prayers" in response to natural and human-caused disasters."The results suggest that the act of praying is a substitute for material help -- in other words, prayers crowd out donations, at least in some contexts," Thunstrom says.In the study, Thunstrom conducted multiple, first-of-their-kind economic experiments on the topic. Three experiments focused on whether people, given the opportunity to donate to hurricane victims, would do so after they pray and think about the victims. A previous study -- conducted in conjunction with former UW sociology faculty member Shiri Noy, now with Denison University in Ohio -- placed actual economic values on thoughts and prayers through an economic experiment involving victims of Hurricane Florence in North Carolina last year.The latter study received major national and international attention after it appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year. That study found that, from the perspective of Christian hurricane victims, the monetary value of prayers by others on their behalf was significant. In contrast, atheists and agnostics were actually "prayer-averse," placing a negative monetary value on prayers on their behalf by others.This new study found that people who prayed for hurricane victims before donating gave less than they would have otherwise: Because those who prayed believed that prayers improved the victims' well-being, they donated less. On the other hand, simply taking a moment to think about victims didn't have a significant effect on the level of donation. It should be noted that these results are not entirely conclusive, though: In one experiment -- in which possible donations were much smaller than in the other experiments -- prayers had no impact on subsequent donations."The result implies that victims of natural disasters may be financially worse off from people expressing their sympathy through the act of praying," Thunstrom says. "However, this does not mean that recipients of prayers are worse off in terms of welfare. It is entirely possible that a recipient of prayers assigns a positive (monetary) value to a prayer, which may or may not exceed the value by which monetary donations drop due to the act of praying."The debate over the value of "thoughts and prayers" has come to the forefront as a result of the verbal responses of political and other leaders to mass shootings and natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires. Critics argue that expressing sympathy through thoughts and prayers is a meaningless gesture in response to tragedy -- and that, in some cases, it's an excuse to not take action.Thunstrom's new article notes that previous research has found that religiosity is positively associated with behavior that benefits other people, such as volunteer work in the community. She also notes that intercessory prayers increase awareness and empathy. But, because religious people believe that prayer directly impacts other people's well-being -- in other words, that prayer is a "moral action" similar to a charitable donation -- prayers can act as a substitute for donations."The results suggest that calls for thoughts and prayers in response to major catastrophes -- whether conducted individually or by entire communities -- might affect, in unexpected and important ways, people's related behavior to benefit others," Thunstrom says, suggesting further research that examines contexts in which complementarity between prayers and donations could exist. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
November 11, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191111150639.htm | Hurricanes have become bigger and more destructive for USA | A new study by researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Aslak Grinsted, Peter Ditlevsen and Jens Hesselbjerg shows that hurricanes have become more destructive since 1900, and the worst of them are more than 3 times as frequent now than 100 years ago. A new way of calculating the destruction, compensating for the societal change in wealth, unequivocally shows a climatic increase in the frequency of the most destructive hurricanes that routinely raise havoc on the North American south- and east coast. The study is now published in | The traditional way of calculating hurricane damage, in order to be able to compare hurricanes and follow their development over time, was to survey the subsequent cost of the damage done by each hurricane. In other words, what would a hurricane from the 1950s cost, if it made landfall today? Using this method, a typical find is that the majority of the rising tendency in damage can be attributed to the fact that there are more of us and we are more wealthy, and there is quite simply more costly infrastructure to suffer damage. But evidence of a climatic change in destructive force by hurricanes has been obscured by statistical uncertainty.Aslak Grinsted has calculated the historical figures in a new way. Instead of comparing single hurricanes and the damage they would cause today, he and his colleagues have assessed how big an area could be viewed as an "area of total destruction." Meaning how large an area would you have to completely destroy in order to account for the financial loss. Simultaneously, this makes comparison between rural areas and more densely populated areas like cities easier, as the unit of calculation is now the same: The size of the "area of total destruction."In previous studies it proved difficult to isolate the "climate signal." The climate signal should be understood as the effect climate change has had on hurricane size, strength and destructive force. It lay hidden behind variations due to the uneven concentration of wealth and it was statistically uncertain whether there was any tendency in the destruction. But with the new method this doubt has been eradicated. The weather has indeed become more dangerous on the south- and east coast of the USA. Furthermore, the result obtained by the research team has turned out to be more congruent with the climate models we use to predict and understand the development in extreme weather. It fits with the physics, quite simply, that global warming has the effect that there is an increase in the force released in the most extreme hurricanes. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
October 30, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191030073317.htm | Unexpected outcomes: Damages to Puerto Rican coffee farms from Hurricane Maria varied | University of Michigan ecologists Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer have studied Latin American coffee farms for a quarter century, and they tracked the recovery of tropical forests in Nicaragua following 1988's Hurricane Joan for nearly 20 years. | So, when Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm in September 2017, Perfecto and Vandermeer had certain expectations about the types and extent of damages the storm would inflict on the coffee industry, long a backbone of the island's agricultural sector.But when they analyzed data collected at 28 Puerto Rican coffee farms less than a year after Maria and compared it to 2013 data from the same farms, many of those expectations flew right out the window.One of the biggest surprises: There was no link between the amount of shade on a coffee farm -- a key measure of management intensity -- and damage from the hurricane.The expectation by Perfecto and Vandermeer going into the Hurricane Maria study was that shade trees would act as windbreaks and that damage to coffee plants would be less severe in these "agroforestry systems" than at farms without trees.While most of the Puerto Rican coffee farms did lose a great deal of shade cover -- an average of 37.5% canopy loss -- there was "no relationship" between the amount of shade on a farm and damage to its coffee plants, the researchers report in a study scheduled for publication Oct. 30 in Instead, the researchers observed an enormous amount of variability.One possible explanation: Yes, the wind-shielding effect of shade trees is real, but it has limits. Maria was the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico since 1928, with sustained winds of 155 mph."Canopy cover with relatively large shade trees is likely to be effective at providing some windbreak protection of coffee plants," said Perfecto, a professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability and first author of the study. "But when winds are so strong, those trees are toppled, and their trunks and canopies can do considerable damage to the coffee trees below."Across Latin America in recent decades, many coffee farmers have abandoned traditional shade-growing techniques, in which the plants are grown beneath a diverse canopy of trees. In an effort to increase production, much of the acreage has been converted to "sun coffee," which involves thinning the canopy or removing it completely.That's also true at coffee farms on Puerto Rico, which are mainly clustered in the island's central western region. Those farms can be placed along a management intensification gradient that runs the gamut from highly diverse shaded systems with a forest-like canopy (least intensified) to coffee monocultures with no shade trees (most intensified).Given this wide range of management styles, Puerto Rico offered the U-M researchers an excellent model system to study the ability of coffee farms to withstand hurricane damage and to recover afterward. It's a research question that's especially important in the context of a changing climate, with the possibility of increasingly frequent intense hurricanes.The U-M-led study examined both resistance, defined as the degree to which a system can withstand damages, and resilience, the degree to which a system returns to its original state after being perturbed.While management style at a given coffee farm proved to be a poor predictor of either resistance or resilience, the socioeconomic context of individual farms seems to be a better indicator, according to the researchers.The importance of socioeconomic context can be seen by examining one key player on any farm or backyard garden: weeds.Hurricane Maria reduced shade cover on Puerto Rico's coffee farms, which stimulated the growth of weeds. Grasses, sedges and broadleaf weeds formed natural trellises that allowed vines to spread to coffee bushes, where they soon engulfed and choked the plants.Farmers who had the resources to hire laborers or to buy herbicides were able to quickly clear weeds before the vines took over.But poor or infirm farmers weren't able to mount a speedy response after the storm. Once vines climb onto coffee bushes, spraying herbicides is no longer an option, and the required labor increases dramatically."These processes make the resilience of coffee farms to hurricane disturbance in Puerto Rico partly a function of shade ... but also, and perhaps more importantly, a function of the socioeconomic position of the farmer," the authors wrote. "In other words, the resilience of the system is a property of socioecological factors."In addition, some farmers who had enough money to fertilize their coffee plants seemed to have weathered the storm better than those who did not fertilize, according to the researchers. Fertilizers (either organic or conventional) can promote the growth of a well-developed root system, which can help plants withstand high winds and heavy rains.The U-M-led research team conducted a survey of 36 Puerto Rican coffee farms in 2013. The study included measurements of shade cover and other variables, as well as interviews with farmers to obtain data on expenditures for pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.Eight of the 36 farms were abandoned after Hurricane Maria. The remaining 28 farms were resurveyed between February and July 2018. A subset of 10 farms were chosen for a detailed examination of key pests on the property. Interviews with farmers on the 10 intensively sampled farms were conducted in August 2018.The projected 2018 coffee harvest for the 10 intensively studied farms averaged 219 kilograms per hectare of green coffee beans, compared to a pre-hurricane average of 1,272 kilograms per hectare for the years 2010 through 2012. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
October 29, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191029182459.htm | Why are big storms bringing so much more rain? Warming, yes, but also winds | For three hurricane seasons in a row, storms with record-breaking rainfall have caused catastrophic flooding in the southern United States: Harvey in 2017, Florence in 2018 and Imelda in 2019. | A new analysis by Princeton researchers explains why this trend is likely to continue with global warming. Both the higher moisture content of warmer air and storms' increasing wind speeds conspire to produce wetter storms, the researchers reported in a study published on October 18 in the "Potential changes in the frequency of occurrence and rainfall rates from tropical cyclones are major concerns for flood hazards in the United States, especially for urban regions along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts," said co-author James Smith, Princeton's William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science. "This study provides an important step in understanding the rainfall rate piece of the problem; the picture is one in which changes in rainfall extremes should be carefully examined in assessing flood hazards."The results help resolve a puzzle that's emerged from recent climate modeling studies. Models project that by the end of the century hurricane rainfall rates will increase up to twice as fast as would be expected due to increasing moisture from rising sea surface temperatures alone. The Princeton team wanted to understand what other forces might contribute to the wetter storms."A predicted increase exceeding simple theory gave us a little bit of discomfort, because we only trust our predictions to the extent that we can understand them, and to the extent to which they show up in observations," said co-author Gabriel Vecchi, a professor of geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute.The researchers suspected that wind might play a role. Climate models also project that tropical storm winds will strengthen as temperatures rise, and observational studies have shown that storms with stronger winds tend to produce higher rainfall rates. Vecchi and his colleagues reasoned that a combination of higher sea surface temperatures and stronger storms might explain the predicted increases in rainfall rates.To test this hypothesis, lead study author Maofeng Liu, a postdoctoral research associate in civil and environmental engineering, devised an approach to isolate the effect of increasing wind speeds: He considered the rainfall rates of projected storms in separate groups according to their wind intensity.For each of six ocean basins where tropical cyclones form, Liu grouped storms according to their maximum sustained wind speeds: tropical storms, with winds between 39 and 73 miles per hour; and hurricanes in Saffir-Simpson categories 1 through 5, with categories 4 and 5 grouped together due to the smaller number of storms at this intensity level.Liu used this resampling method to analyze more than 4,000 simulated storms under current and future climate conditions. The approach revealed that within each storm intensity category, increases in rainfall rates with rising temperatures aligned well with the increase per degree Celsius of warming expected according to classical thermodynamics (about 7%). Only when storms of all intensities were grouped together did rainfall rates appear to outpace what would be expected to happen as a result of temperature increases alone."We found that not only did a storm's holding capacity for water vapor increase because of global warming," said Liu, "but also that the storms were getting stronger and contributing to higher rainfall rates."Vecchi noted that several studies have shown the current probability of a storm like Hurricane Harvey is twice as high because of global warming. "This study makes a statement about the future," he said. "But we're having this convergence, where our observations are starting to show the increased rainfall that our models have been predicting for quite a while, and now we also have a clear theoretical understanding as to why it should be happening." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
October 29, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191029144312.htm | Living through Katrina associated with higher death rate among breast cancer patients | Breast cancer patients who endured Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have a 15% higher mortality rate than those patients not exposed to the storm, according to a University of Michigan researcher. | This increase was likely caused by disaster-related health care disruptions, said Sue Anne Bell, an assistant professor at the U-M School of Nursing and a member of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.Bell is first author on two unrelated studies that outline these findings: The most recent compares cancer patients in Louisiana who experienced Katrina to similar patients who did not experience a hurricane.The second analyzes interruptions in home health care during Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas in 2017. While the study didn't look specifically at cancer patients, the overall findings may help explain the higher breast cancer mortality rate for Katrina survivors, Bell said.Both studies suggest a larger, more somber message."With an aging population there's a much higher rate of chronic disease that requires sustained treatment and access to health care," Bell said. "How will we meet dialysis needs or the needs of someone with high blood pressure or diabetes or cancer?"Even missing one week of chemotherapy has significant effects on long-term mortality. What does it mean if your access to health care is disrupted for an even longer period of time because of a disaster?"In the cancer study, researchers compared 10-year mortality rates of Katrina survivors diagnosed with breast, lung or colon cancer within six months of the hurricane, against similar cancer patients elsewhere. They identified 1,738 cancers cases in the 12 parishes in Louisiana most affected by Katrina and 6,557 cases in unaffected counties.After adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics and cancer stage, associations among all cancer types trended toward higher mortality, but the association was statistically significant only among breast cancer cases.Bell believes that number is higher. The study was limited by the difficulty quantifying geographic inequalities that account for higher mortality among poor people diagnosed with cancer."One goal of my work is to find ways to drill down to the specificity of care within counties affected by a disaster," Bell said. "There is a lot of variability. We need more precise ways to measure what happens to people after a disaster."The first step is getting a clear picture of the outcomes for older adults and people with chronic diseases after a disaster, Bell said."In the meantime, sharing resources like medical records, making them easier to access, and cooperative agreements between health systems that are receiving survivors would help," she said.In the home health study, Bell said that despite activating emergency plans, only 45% of 122 Texas home health agencies stayed open during Hurricane Harvey. Three-fourths reported that home visits were disrupted and nearly half of those lasted longer than one week. Yet, only 3% of agencies reported receiving outside help.As a clinician scientist and disaster responder, Bell sees unmet need and misery during and after disasters -- especially in the elderly or chronically ill.During Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, Bell said she "saw hundreds of people waiting to be seen for primary care complaints because they didn't have health care. They came multiple times and waited hours. Hospitals were full, health care offices were closed."Planning is important, she said. In the home care study, agencies reported moving up treatment for dressing changes or medication refills. Individuals should know medications and doses, and strategize backup plans with a PCP, she said."For instance, what if there's no power for electrical medical equipment? What if I must evacuate and miss medical appointments? There's a fair bit of personal accountability that the individual can do beforehand," Bell said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
October 15, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191015115401.htm | Strong storms generating earthquake-like seismic activity | A Florida State University researcher has uncovered a new geophysical phenomenon where a hurricane or other strong storm can spark seismic events in the nearby ocean as strong as a 3.5 magnitude earthquake. | "We're calling them 'stormquakes,'" said lead author Wenyuan Fan, an assistant professor of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. "This involves coupling of the atmosphere-ocean and solid earth. During a storm season, hurricanes or nor'easters transfer energy into the ocean as strong ocean waves, and the waves interact with the solid earth producing intense seismic source activity." The research is published in the journal Fan and his colleagues analyzed nearly a decade of seismic and oceanographic records from September 2006 to February 2019 and found a connection between strong storms and intense seismic activity near the edge of continental shelves or ocean banks.Specifically, researchers found evidence of more than 10,000 stormquakes from 2006 to 2019 offshore of New England, Florida and in the Gulf of Mexico in the United States, as well as offshore of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and British Columbia in Canada."We can have seismic sources in the ocean just like earthquakes within the crust," Fan said. "The exciting part is seismic sources caused by hurricanes can last from hours to days."Fan and his colleagues developed a novel approach to detect and locate seismic events and determine whether the seismic event is a stormquake. It must occur during a stormy day and meet other geophysical standards to determine the robustness of the correlation between the storm and the seismic event. Additionally, other seismic events such as earthquakes must be ruled out.One example the researchers cited was Hurricane Bill, an Atlantic hurricane that originated on Aug. 15, 2009, strengthened into a Category 4 hurricane and ultimately struck Newfoundland as a tropical storm. It was a Category 1 hurricane when it approached offshore New England on Aug. 22, 2009.When the hurricane arrived, numerous seismic events were located off the New England and Nova Scotia coasts, which produced transcontinental surface waves. Similarly, Hurricane Ike in 2008 caused stormquake activity in the Gulf of Mexico and Hurricane Irene in 2011 did the same near Little Bahama Bank off Florida's shore.Fan and his colleagues noted that not all hurricanes cause stormquakes. There are hotspots. Scientists detected no evidence of stormquakes off of Mexico or from New Jersey to Georgia in the United States. Even Hurricane Sandy, one of the costliest storms on record in the United States, did not spur stormquakes.This suggests that stormquakes are strongly influenced by the local oceanographic features and seafloor topography, Fan said."We have lots of unknowns," Fan said. "We weren't even aware of the existence of the natural phenomenon. It really highlights the richness of the seismic wave field and suggests we are reaching a new level of understanding of seismic waves."Researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as well as Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the U.S. Geological Survey contributed to this research. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
October 14, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191014181654.htm | Study finds topsoil is key harbinger of lead exposure risks for children | Tracking lead levels in soil over time is critical for cities to determine lead contamination risks for their youngest and most vulnerable residents, according to a new Tulane University study published in the | The study, which focuses on New Orleans but could serve as a model for cities around the world, is the first to show how long-term changes in soil lead levels have a corresponding impact in lead blood levels in children."Lead dust is invisible and it's tragic that lead-contaminated outdoor areas are unwittingly provided for children as places to play," says lead study author Howard Mielke, a pharmacology research professor at Tulane University School of Medicine. "Young children are extremely vulnerable to lead poisoning because of their normal crawling, hand-to-mouth, exploratory behavior."Exposure to lead is often irreversible, particularly for children, and includes behavioral or learning problems, decreased IQ, hyperactivity, delayed growth, hearing problems, anemia, kidney disease and cancer. In rare cases, exposure can lead to seizures, coma, or death.In metropolitan New Orleans, children living in communities with more lead in the soil and higher blood lead levels have the lowest school performance scores. Lead was recently cited as a top risk factor for premature death in the United States, particularly from cardiovascular disease, and is responsible for 412,000 premature deaths each year.The research team began tracking the amount of lead in New Orleans soil in 2001, collecting about 5,500 samples in neighborhoods, along busy streets, close to houses and in open spaces including parks. The team from Mielke's Lead Lab collected another round of soil sampling 16 years later. Those samples showed a 44% decrease in the amount of soil lead in communities flooded during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as well as soils in communities not affected by the levee failures and storm surge.Researchers then compared the soil lead with children's blood lead data maintained by the Louisiana Healthy Homes and Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program from 2000-2005 and 2011-2016. Researchers found that lead in blood samples decreased by 64% from 2000-2005 to the 2011-2016 time period and that decreasing lead in topsoil played a key factor in the declining children's blood lead levels.Lead exposure is a critical environmental justice issue, according to researchers. The team found black children were three times more likely than white children to have higher blood lead levels, which could be explained by socioeconomic status and education, the type and age of housing and proximity to major roads and industry."While the metabolism of the city could theoretically affect all residents equally, in reality social formations produce inequitable outcomes in which vulnerable populations tend to bear greater burdens of contaminant exposure," Mielke says.Mielke says further study is needed to determine if demographic changes in New Orleans since 2001 contributed to the decline in children's blood lead levels, and if decreases are occurring equitably for all populations.This new study is co-authored by researchers from Australia, Colorado State University, and City University of New York. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
October 8, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191008104650.htm | Believing in climate change doesn't mean you are preparing for climate change | Believing in climate change has no effect on whether or not coastal homeowners are protecting their homes from climate change-related hazards, according to a new study from the University of Notre Dame. | Funded by Notre Dame's Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN), the study analyzed data from a 2017 Coastal Homeowner Survey of 662 respondents in one of the most frequently exposed U.S. coastal communities, New Hanover County, North Carolina. Just one year after the survey, the county was affected by Hurricane Florence and was nearly missed by Hurricane Dorian in September.The survey asked homeowners whether they believed in climate change, in human causation of climate change, or in God having a role in controlling the weather or climate. Coastal homeowners were also questioned about their knowledge of climate-related hazards, their knowledge of warming oceans and their perception of the seriousness of the impact of climate change."We found that climate change attitudes have little to no statistically significant effect on coastal homeowners' actions towards home protection, homeowner action or homeowner intentions to act in the future," said Tracy Kijewski-Correa, the Leo E. and Patti Ruth Linbeck Collegiate Chair and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences, associate professor of global affairs and co-author of the study. "This is despite the fact that with climate change, U.S. coastlines have experienced increased frequency and intensity of tropical storms and sea level rise, which has further heightened their vulnerability to waves, storm surge and high-tide flooding."According to the study published in "Despite persistent differences between Democrat and Republican ideologies in regards to climate change, the behavior of people from either party appears relatively similar. Neither has or intends to take action to improve the structural vulnerabilities of their homes," said Debra Javeline, associate professor of political science at Notre Dame and lead author of the study. "Homeowners' knowledge about climate change also held no significance, showing that providing more information and understanding may not be the main driver of convincing homeowners to reduce the vulnerabilities of their coastal homes."The research team found that although coastal homeowners may perceive a worsening of climate change-related hazards, these attitudes are largely unrelated to a homeowner's expectations of actual home damage. Javeline says this may be a reflection of the limited communication about home vulnerabilities from other key stakeholders, like insurance companies, government agencies or sellers of home improvement products."Although increasing education and awareness of climate change is important, our findings suggest that encouraging homeowners to reduce the vulnerability of their coastal home may be more effective if expressed in regards to structural mitigation and its economic benefits, rather than in context of climate change," said Javeline. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
October 7, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191007153500.htm | Costs of natural disasters are increasing at the high end | While the economic cost of natural disasters has not increased much on average, averages can be deceptive. The costs of major disasters like hurricanes Katrina, Maria and Dorian or the massive tornado swarms in the Midwest have increased to a disproportionately larger extent than those of lesser events, and these major disasters have become far more expensive, according to an international team of researchers. | According to the researchers, climate change is linked to an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, which leads to the necessity of planning for and evaluating the risk of these disasters. Two years after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico is still recovering, and weeks after Dorian decimated Abaco and Grand Bahama, the recovery process of what looks like an enormous blast zone is still unclear. The impacts on New Orleans of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 are still visible in that city today."We have a whole distribution of damages that we usually average to determine economic impacts," said Francesca Chiaromonte, holder of the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Statistics for the Life Sciences and professor of statistics at Penn State. "But it is the extreme events that cause the damages that are most difficult to deal with."With the larger, dramatic events becoming more costly, understanding the impacts and planning for future costs are important. If only averages are looked at, people can miss important changes."Large events can overwhelm local infrastructures," said Klaus Keller, professor of geosciences and director of the Center for Climate Risk Management at Penn State. "Many decision-makers are designing strategies to manage climate risk. The success of these strategies often hinges critically on how extreme events are changing."Policies based only on average annual or decadal costs do not account for the increasing impact of the most dramatic events."Things really ramp up at the top 5% mark," said Chiaromonte, who is also scientific coordinator of the EMbeDS Department of Excellence at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced studies in Pisa, Italy. "And when we get to the top 1%, damages increased approximately 20 fold between 1970 and 2010."The researchers chose a quantile regression to analyze the data to move away from "average" data findings. They also accounted for some important controls, such as changes in population and wealth over time. Even when accounting for these changes, single-event damages in the top 1% are estimated to increase by $26 million every year."While the effect of time on averages is hard to detect, effects on extreme damages are large, statistically significant and growing with increasing percentiles," the researchers report today (Oct. 7) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The researchers note that increases in the costs of extreme natural disasters are not uniform around the globe. They appear more dramatic in areas traditionally considered temperate."This may be due to the fact that extreme disasters are now hitting temperate areas as well as the fact that these areas are less prepared to deal with extreme disasters compared to tropical regions," said Chiaromonte. "Tropical regions, especially those in the rich part of the world, have developed mechanisms to attenuate the impacts of extreme disasters. Similar efforts may, in fact, be needed in areas that we have traditionally considered 'safer.'"While the economic impact of extreme natural disasters is increasing, based on the data considered in the study, mortality is on a downward trend, perhaps because of lower vulnerabilities, improved early warning systems and evacuation systems, and more effective relief efforts. However, this should not breed complacency, the researchers note. The data indicate an increase in casualties linked to extreme temperature events.An important implication of this study is that the insurance industry and public disaster management institutions should expect to face increasing economic losses, the researchers said. Another important implication is that adaptation measures will be critical in temperate areas as well as in the tropics.The researchers also note that if part of the shift to larger, more expensive, natural disasters is the result of climate change, then mitigation of climate change is an obvious approach to mitigating economic impacts.Also working on this project were Matteo Coronese, doctoral student in economics, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies; Francesco Lamperti, assistant professor, Institute of Economics, Sant'Anna School, and research fellow, RFF-CMCC European Institute of Economics and the Environment, Milan, Italy; and Andrea Roventini, professor, Institute of Economics, Sant'Anna School, and research fellow, OFCE Science Po, Sophia Antinopolis, France.The European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program and the Penn State Center for Climate Risk Management supported this work. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
September 26, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190926114009.htm | Hurricanes: Improving rapid intensification predictions | Rapid intensification is a serious challenge for the prediction of hurricane intensity. An example is Hurricane Maria in 2017, which intensified to a Category 5 storm within 24 hours and destroyed Puerto Rico. None of the computer models were able to predict it. A more recent example is Hurricane Dorian, which was predicted to become just a tropical storm, before it rapidly intensified into a Category 5 storm and caused extensive damage in the Bahamas. | An Index to Better Estimate Tropical Cyclone Intensity Change in the Western North Pacific, published in the September 2019 issue of American Geophysical Union's journal "The objective of this study is to improve intensity prediction, especially in a short temporal range of 24 hours," said Woojeong Lee, Ph.D., from the National Typhoon Center, Jeju, the Republic of Korea, who is the first author of this paper. "We developed a synoptic predictor for intensity change based on the microphysics study of the air-sea interface in hurricane conditions conducted by U.S. scientists from Nova Southeastern University (NSU), the University of Miami, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Rhode Island."While track prediction of tropical cyclones (TCs) has improved steadily over the last three decades, there has been comparatively little advancement in intensity prediction due to the complicated physical mechanisms involved in internal TC dynamics and their interaction with upper ocean and atmospheric circulation. This new index is expected to contribute to improvements in real?time intensity forecasts, not only for the western North Pacific but also for other basins including Florida, the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.Alexander Soloviev, Ph.D., a professor and research scientist at NSU's Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography who co-authored the paper, said the new algorithm may be a game changer in the field of hurricane intensity prediction."We have taken into account the phenomenon of the 'slippery sea surface' under certain hurricane conditions, which is conducive to rapid storm intensification," he said.These results were previously published in the Nature Scientific Reports and the Journal of Geophysical Research and implemented in the new operational index for rapid intensification, which reduced the error of tropical cyclone prediction within 24 hour period by 16%. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
September 24, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190924154350.htm | Hurricane resilience in the bahamas: Ecosystem | As new hurricanes gain strength in the Atlantic, residents of the Bahamas have barely begun recovering from destroyed villages and flooded streets brought by Hurricane Dorian's battering this month. The losses were grim validation of a new Stanford-led study on coastal risk throughout the country. | The study predicts a tripling of storm-related damages if protective ecosystems such as coral reefs and mangrove forests are degraded or lost. The findings, published in "Climate change is forcing coastal nations to reckon with a new reality of disaster management and rethink the business-as-usual development model in order to survive," said Jessica Silver, ecosystem services analyst at Stanford's Natural Capital Project and lead author on the study. "In the Bahamas, the islands hardest hit by Hurricane Dorian -- Grand Bahama and Abaco -- are those our research identified as the most at risk to coastal hazards in the whole country. Understanding and mapping at-risk areas and their natural assets is a first step in changing development norms."The integrated approach scientists used in this study could also help other coastal communities plan where to invest in natural habitats to reduce storm damage. A combination of open-source modeling software and cutting-edge environmental analyses with local information can be used to identify where and how people in coastal communities are at greatest risk to climate disasters.Silver and other researchers at the Natural Capital Project have been working in the Bahamas for five years alongside government partners, Bahamian scientists, The Nature Conservancy and the Inter-American Development Bank. Together, they have modeled coastal hazards and the role nature plays in reducing risk in the country."We need solutions that leverage powerful allies to protect coastal communities now and in the future," Silver said. "In the Bahamas, these allies include the hundreds of kilometers of coastal forests, mangroves, barrier and fringing reef, and seagrasses that envelop the archipelago."The work is part of a growing body of research showing that natural defenses can, in many places, represent more climate-resilient alternatives to traditional built shoreline protection -- like seawalls and jetties -- which is expensive to build and maintain.For example, coral reefs weaken storm surges by taking the energy out of waves. The waves that do make it past the reefs are buffered by mangrove forests and seagrass beds, which also secure sand and sediment to prevent shoreline erosion. By the time a storm reaches homes and streets, the island's environmental barricades have gradually lessened its strength. These natural defenses are also a local source of sustenance and economic security. Healthy coastal habitats support abundant fisheries -- a resource especially important in the aftermath of a storm, when food supplies are low. Thriving marine areas help communities regain their financial footing through key industries like tourism and commercial fishing.Local decision-makers often lack basic information about where and how to invest in critical risk-reducing ecosystems. So, the research team combined information on storm waves and sea-level rise with maps of coastal habitats and census data to close this information gap. The researchers assessed the risk reduction provided by coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass along the entire coast of the Bahamas using open-source software developed by the Natural Capital Project. They looked at current and projected sea-level rise scenarios to identify the most vulnerable groups of people and where they live."Our results show that the population most exposed to coastal hazards would more than double with future sea-level rise and more than triple if ecosystems were lost or degraded," said Katie Arkema, co-author and lead scientist at the Natural Capital Project. "We see that on populated islands like Grand Bahama and Abaco, natural habitats provide protection to disproportionately large numbers of people compared to the rest of the country. Without them, the destruction from Dorian could have been even worse."The study equips the Bahamian government and supporting development banks with clear, actionable information to guide future investments in natural ecosystems. It shows where nature is providing the greatest benefit to people and can help decision-makers understand where and how targeted conservation and restoration projects could support coastal resilience. In the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian's destruction, the Stanford team has been in close communication with their Bahamian co-authors, who are already using these results to call for strategic investments in nature."We hope, in some small way, that the results of this study will help our friends and colleagues build a more resilient future for the Bahamas," Silver said. "And, we hope that other countries will look to the Bahamas as a beacon of progress and fortitude in the face of climate adversity." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
September 19, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190919160130.htm | Hurricane Nicole sheds light on how storms impact deep ocean | In early October 2016, a tropical storm named Nicole formed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It roamed for six days, reaching Category 4 hurricane status with powerful 140 mile-per hour-winds, before hitting the tiny island of Bermuda as a Category 3. | Hurricanes like Nicole can cause significant damage to human structures on land, and often permanently alter terrestrial landscapes. But these powerful storms also affect the ocean.Scientists have a good understanding of how hurricanes impact the surface layer of the ocean, the sunlit zone, where photosynthesis can occur. Hurricanes' strong winds churn colder water up from below, bringing nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus to the surface and stimulating short-lived algae blooms. However, until recently, we didn't know much about how hurricanes impact the deep ocean.A new study of Hurricane Nicole by researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, and the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) has provided novel insight on those impacts. Nicole had a significant effect on the ocean's carbon cycle and deep sea ecosystems, the team reports.The Oceanic Flux Program (OFP) has been continuously measuring sinking particles, known as marine snow, in the deep Sargasso Sea since 1978. It's the longest-running time series of its kind.Before hitting Bermuda, Hurricane Nicole passed right through the OFP site, about 50 miles southeast of Bermuda. This gave the scientists a unique opportunity to study how hurricanes impact the deep ocean.To study the deep ocean, the OFP strings scientific equipment, including sediment traps, at various depths on a mooring line that extends up from a 2,000-pound anchor situated on the seafloor (2.8 miles below the surface).In the new study, published in High-velocity winds associated with Hurricane Nicole generated intense surface-ocean cooling and strong currents and underwater waves, some of which lasted more than two weeks. This significantly accelerated the biological pump, with the currents pushing nutrients into the surface layer, triggering an algae bloom.The supercharged biological pump then rapidly funneled the organic material from the hurricane-induced algae bloom down into the deep ocean. This provided a big boost of food for marine life in the deep ocean where light doesn't reach.The scientists found substantial increases in fresh organic materials in sediment traps at 4,900 feet and 10,500 feet below the surface. Algae growth measurements at the OFP site after Hurricane Nicole's passage were among the highest observed in October over the last 25 years."The surface and the deep ocean are really well connected in the aftermath of these powerful storms," explained Rut Pedrosa Pàmies, a biogeochemist and oceanographer at MBL's Ecosystems Center and first author of the study. "The material that is reaching those depths is crucial for the deep-ocean ecosystem."Since 1980, seven Category 3 or greater hurricanes have passed within 186 miles of Bermuda. These hurricanes affected a total of more than 32,800 square miles of surface water, an area greater than the state of Maine.Current climate models indicate that hurricane intensity could increase as human-induced global warming continues. This could expand the area of ocean disturbed by hurricanes, with implications for the ocean's biogeochemical cycles and deep-ocean ecosystems.Due to the extreme conditions of the deep ocean, this remarkable biome has been notoriously difficult for scientists to study. Additionally, due to difficulties of shipboard data collection in extreme weather conditions, the direct impacts of hurricanes are not well understood. Sediment traps like those used by the OFP are crucial to understanding their influence on the deep ocean.When the OFP began in 1978, scientists were only able to collect a single cup of sinking particles every two months. "Now, we have biweekly sample resolution and sediment traps at three depths," Pedrosa Pàmies said.With the proliferation of new equipment and technologies to study the deep ocean, understanding this last frontier is finally within reach. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
September 18, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190918122508.htm | Coastal birds can weather the storm, but not the sea | How can birds that weigh less than a AA battery survive the immense power of Atlantic hurricanes? A new study in Ecology Letters finds that these coastal birds survive because their populations can absorb impacts and recover quickly from hurricanes -- even storms many times larger than anything previously observed. | "Coastal birds are often held up as symbols of vulnerability to hurricanes and oil spills, but many populations can be quite resilient to big disturbances," explains lead author Dr. Christopher Field, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland's National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). "The impacts of hurricanes, in terms of populations rather than individual birds, tend to be surprisingly small compared to the other threats that are causing these species to decline."Field and colleagues from five other universities studied the resilience of four species of coastal birds, including the endangered Saltmarsh Sparrow. The researchers developed simulations that allowed them to explore how disturbances like hurricanes would affect the birds' populations over time. They started with models that project population sizes into the future based on the species' birth and death rates. The research team then subjected these populations to simulated hurricanes that killed a certain number of birds. Because they were using computational simulations, the researchers were able to look at the full range of potential hurricane sizes -- from storms that caused no bird deaths to storms that were more severe than anything ever observed.The researchers found that the four coastal species were able to absorb the impacts of storms across a wide range in severity. For example, the study found that a storm could cause mortality for a third of Saltmarsh Sparrows and Clapper Rails in one year, and it would still be unlikely that their populations would deviate significantly from their trajectories over time.Resilience can be defined in many ways, so Field and colleagues borrowed concepts from classical ecology and applied them to bird populations. They used these concepts to better understand the risk that these species could face from storms that are strengthening because of climate change. The research team looked not only at the ability of populations to absorb impacts, but also the birds' ability to recover over time after large disturbances. Two of the species in the study, Saltmarsh Sparrows and Clapper Rails, are declining, largely from increased coastal flooding caused by higher sea levels. The researchers found that populations were often able to recover from large storms within 20 years, even when populations continued to decline from other threats, such as regular flooding.If coastal birds are resilient to hurricanes, does that mean they will be resilient to climate change? "It's tempting to focus on dramatic events like hurricanes, especially as they get stronger from climate change," Field says. "But less visible threats like sea-level rise and increased coastal flooding are here to stay, and they are they are going to continue to drive coastal birds, like Saltmarsh Sparrows, toward extinction."Dr. Chris Elphick, a coauthor on the study from the University of Connecticut, suggests that there are lessons here for people too. "After a big event like a hurricane, we often rush to rebuild and improve coastal resilience without thinking as much as we perhaps should about the longer term chronic changes in the system. Obviously, we need to respond to the damage done, but addressing the gradual, less noticeable changes, may be just as important to coastal communities in the long run." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
September 4, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190904081313.htm | Many older adults aren't fully prepared for emergency situations, poll finds | Most people over age 50 say they're ready for natural disasters and emergency situations, but a new national poll shows that many haven't taken key steps to protect their health and well-being in case of severe weather, long-term power outages or other situations. | Less than half have signed up for emergency warning systems offered by their community, which can give crucial information in case of storms, natural disasters, lockdowns, evacuation orders, public health emergencies and more.Less than a third have put together an emergency kit with essential supplies and medicines to get them through an emergency at home or take with them in an evacuation. And only a quarter of those who rely on electrical power to run health-related equipment have a backup power supply.These findings and other new data from the National Poll on Healthy Aging, suggest that older adults and their loved ones and health care providers should take time to focus on key steps recommended by emergency preparedness professionals, and planning for how they will cope and communicate in an emergency.The poll, carried out by the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation with support from AARP and Michigan Medicine, U-M's academic medical center, asked a national sample of more than 2,200 adults aged 50 to 80 questions about their readiness for several kinds of emergency situations. Three-quarters of those polled said they had experienced at least one major emergency in their life."Whether it's as straightforward as a power outage that lasts a day, or as severe as a hurricane, tornado or earthquake, preparing can make a huge difference," says Preeti Malani, M.D., the poll's director and a professor at the U-M Medical School. "A bit of time spent now can protect your health, and spare you worry and expense, when something like this does happen."Sue Anne Bell, Ph.D., FNP-BC, a U-M School of Nursing researcher and IHPI member who studies the health implications of major emergencies and disasters, worked with the poll team. "The results of this poll can be used to target efforts to better support older adults to prepare for an emergency," she says. "By knowing areas where older adults are well prepared, and where they are not, programs can work alongside older adults to become fully prepared and ready."Bell notes that one of the most important steps any adult can take to be ready for emergency situations is to talk with loved ones about what to do in different situations, and what needs they should consider. For older adults with health conditions, who often rely on medication, medical supplies and equipment, this can be especially important.But the poll found that only 40 percent of older adults have spoken with their loved ones about such issues."Having a basic emergency plan to evacuate and stay safe during a flood, hurricane or fire is a smart idea for everyone," says Alison Bryant, Ph.D., senior vice president of research for AARP. "Preparing for natural disasters is particularly important for family caregivers caring for older adults who may have serious health and mobility challenges that need to be considered."The poll does show some areas where most older adults appear prepared. For instance, 82 percent said they have a week's supply of their medications on hand, and 72 percent said they have a week's worth of other health supplies. Experts recommend having at least this amount on hand.When it came to food and water, however, just over half of those polled said they had the recommended week's worth of these supplies on hand. Even fewer had cell phone chargers and radios that didn't require electrical power.If they had to evacuate their homes, nearly all those polled said they would have transportation. But for one in four, paying for a place to stay for a week would be a serious challenge.Financial readiness -- including saving up for an emergency fund to cover any sort of unexpected costs -- is a key part of emergency preparedness, says Bell.The National Poll on Healthy Aging results are based on responses from a nationally representative sample of 2,249 adults aged 50 to 80 who answered a wide range of questions online. Questions were written, and data interpreted and compiled, by the IHPI team. Laptops and Internet access were provided to poll respondents who did not already have them.A full report of the findings and methodology is available at | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
August 20, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190820081833.htm | Hurricanes drive the evolution of more aggressive spiders | Researchers at McMaster University who rush in after storms to study the behaviour of spiders have found that extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones may have an evolutionary impact on populations living in storm-prone regions, where aggressive spiders have the best odds of survival. | Raging winds can demolish trees, defoliate entire canopies and scatter debris across forest floors, radically altering the habitats and reshaping the selective pressures on many organisms, suggests a new study published today in the journal "It is tremendously important to understand the environmental impacts of these 'black swan' weather events on evolution and natural selection," says lead author Jonathan Pruitt, an evolutionary biologist and Canada 150 Chair in McMaster's Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour."As sea levels rise, the incidence of tropical storms will only increase. Now more than ever we need to contend with what the ecological and evolutionary impacts of these storms will be for non-human animals," he says.Pruitt and his team examined female colonies of the spider known as Anelosimus studiosus, which lives along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States and Mexico, directly in the path of tropical cyclones that form in the Atlantic basin from May to November.To conduct the research, scientists had to tackle many logistical and methodological challenges which included anticipating the trajectory of the tropical cyclones. Once a storm's path was determined, they sampled populations before landfall, then returned to the sites within 48 hours.They sampled 240 colonies throughout the storm-prone coastal regions, and compared them to control sites, with particular interest in determining if extreme weather -- in this case areas disturbed in 2018 by subtropical storm Alberto, Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Michael -- caused particular spider traits to prevail over others.As a species, A. studiosus is divided into two sets of inherited personality traits: docile and aggressive. The aggressiveness of a colony is determined by the speed and number of attackers that respond to prey, the tendency to cannibalize males and eggs, the vulnerability to infiltration by predatory foreign spiders, among other characteristics.Aggressive colonies, for example, are better at acquiring resources when scarce but are also more prone to infighting when deprived of food for long periods of time or when colonies become overheated."Tropical cyclones likely impact both of these stressors by altering the numbers of flying prey and increasing sun exposure from a more open canopy layer," explains Pruitt. "Aggressiveness is passed down through generations in these colonies, from parent to daughter, and is a major factor in their survival and ability to reproduce."The analysis suggested that after a tropical cyclone event, colonies with more aggressive foraging responses produced more egg cases and had more spiderlings survive into early winter. The trend was consistent across multiple storms that varied in size, duration and intensity, suggesting the effects are robust evolutionary responses, says Pruitt. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
August 15, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190815113737.htm | Data assimilation method offers improved hurricane forecasting | Operational models for severe weather forecasting predicted Hurricane Harvey would become a Category 1 hurricane in 2017, according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Instead, it became a massive Category 4 just before it made landfall, tying Hurricane Katrina for the costliest hurricane on record. | Now a new approach developed at Penn State's Center for Advanced Data Assimilation and Predictability Techniques can forecast the intensity and trajectory of Hurricane Harvey, according to researchers at Penn State and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.The approach used data from the GOES-16 satellite, coupled with Penn State's all-sky radiance method, which more accurately modeled Hurricane Harvey. The data is called "all-sky" because it captures data in all weather conditions, including clouds and rain.The work, led by Fuqing Zhang, distinguished professor of meteorology and atmospheric science at Penn State, now deceased, is the first time GOES-16 satellite data was used to forecast hurricanes. Hurricane Harvey was the first major hurricane captured by GOES-16, which became fully operational in 2017. Zhang died in July not long after being diagnosed with cancer.When he discussed the research in June, Zhang said, "This is still experimental. We have demonstrated that we can improve the track, position, intensity and structure of this particular event. We still need to study all other hurricane events with new satellite data but this gives us a lot of promises for the future of hurricane forecasting."Zhang added that this study, published in the In this proof-of-concept study, researchers used hindcasting -- using data collected during the event, but analyzing it afterwards. This allowed researchers to hone in on the most telling data and further refine the model.The process for creating operational-ready models often takes several years. It begins with hindcasted models before those models are tested alongside existing models to see if any improvements occurred. Because weather forecasting saves lives, the models undergo strict procedures and testing before implementation.The all-sky radiance approach was paired with a model developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research with help from members of Penn State's Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science. When running the model for a 24-hour period, researchers found assimilating all-sky radiance data better reproduced cloud intensity and patterns when contrasted with the current model. That led to more accurate forecasting in both the eye of the storm and peripherals.Research shows common inaccuracies in forecasting hurricane intensity and structure days in advance primarily come from poor hurricane vortex generation. Better predicting the eyewall and secondary circulations of a storm could lead to more accurate hurricane prediction, Zhang said."We will continue to test our satellite data assimilation system with more hurricanes to see if this method works well with other severe weather events," said Xingchao Chen, an assistant research professor at Penn State who was involved in this research. "In addition to all-sky infrared radiances, we are beginning to look at microwave radiances, which effectively penetrate cloudy regions."When researchers contrasted images created using models with and without all-sky radiance data included, it not only showed a stark improvement over operational models, it created images nearly identical to actual satellite images during the storm. The operational models that failed to predict the rapid intensification of Harvey included the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) regional-scale Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting Model, NOAA's Global Forecast System, and the integrated forecast system by the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts."That's the beauty of assimilating the GOES-16 satellite," Zhang said. "It looks almost identical to the actual observation. The use of all-sky radiance doesn't just improve existing models. It makes a huge difference."Masashi Minamide, Robert G. Nystrom and Xingchao Chen, all of Penn State, and Shian-Jiann Lin and Lucas M. Harris, of NOAA, contributed to this research. This research was funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation and NOAA. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
July 25, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190725092540.htm | Coping skills program helps social service workers reduce stress, trauma after disasters | An intervention called Caregivers Journey of Hope can help social service workers -- especially those with the least experience in the field -- to mitigate the stress and trauma they may experience when they're helping community members recover from disasters, a new study found. | There's a significant need for mental health interventions for social service workers, who are at high risk of burnout, chronic stress and emotional distress in disaster recovery, said the study's co-authors, University of Illinois social work professors Tara Powell and Kate M. Wegmann."Since many people in helping professions may be trying to rebuild their own lives while helping traumatized people in the community, providing these workers with the training and tools to practice physical, emotional and social self-care is critical to helping them reduce their own stress and avert burnout," said Powell, who led the study.Powell and her co-authors examined the impact that the Caregivers Journey of Hope workshop had on 722 professionals who assisted victims of Superstorm Sandy in New York and New Jersey.Sandy ravaged the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean during October 2012, killing more than 200 people and causing more than $70 billion in damage. New York and New Jersey were among the hardest-hit regions on the U.S. mainland, where 87 people died and more than 650,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, according to the study.Powell co-developed the Caregivers Journey of Hope curriculum while working for Save the Children. The curriculum was designed to bolster the resilience of social workers, teachers and children in New Orleans and reduce emotional distress they experienced as a result of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.Recovery from disasters often takes years, Powell and Wegmann noted in the study. Working closely with traumatized clients and vicariously experiencing their terror and pain can adversely affect the mental health of counselors and social workers.In turn, this distress can trigger a host of emotional, behavioral, physical and interpersonal problems, negatively affecting caregivers' job performance and personal lives, according to the study.Obtaining social support can be especially important for counselors because the often-confidential nature of their work prevents them from discussing traumatizing or stressful experiences outside the workplace, the researchers wrote."The half-day Caregivers Journey of Hope workshop gives front-line care providers an opportunity to process disaster-related stress in a safe, confidential environment, build social support and develop strategies to cope with stressors in the workplace and at home," Powell said. "A wealth of research over the past couple of decades has illustrated that higher levels of stress are associated with lower levels of social support."Working in small groups, workshop participants share their experiences; explore the types, sources and effects of stress; and develop solutions, such as ways they can build their social support networks. They also discuss strategies for rebuilding their communities and for enhancing individual and community-level recovery.Powell and Wegmann tested the intervention with social workers and counselors from 37 agencies in New York and New Jersey after Sandy.Participants reported substantial decreases in their stress levels and showed significant improvements on all of the other measures surveyed, the researchers found.Caregivers who were newest on the job -- those with one to four years' experience -- benefitted the most, showing the greatest gains in their ability to recognize the signs and effects of stress and in their perceived ability to cope with taxing situations."This finding is of particular importance, as those with less experience in the social service field are at a higher risk for experiencing various forms of caregiver distress," Wegmann said. "Research has shown that those who perceive that they can actively cope with stressors or who have higher coping self-efficacy tend to have better health and mental health outcomes." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
July 23, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190723085957.htm | North Carolina coastal flooding is worsening with climate change, population growth | A historic 120-year-old data set is allowing researchers to confirm what data modeling systems have been predicting about climate change: Climate change is increasing precipitation events like hurricanes, tropical storms and floods. | Researchers analyzed a continuous record kept since 1898 of tropical cyclone landfalls and rainfall associated with Coastal North Carolina storms. They found that six of the seven highest precipitation events in that record have occurred within the last 20 years, according to the study."North Carolina has one of the highest impact zones of tropical cyclones in the world, and we have these carefully kept records that shows us that the last 20 years of precipitation events have been off the charts," said Hans Paerl, Kenan Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at the UNC-Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences.Paerl is lead author on the paper, "Recent increase in catastrophic tropical cyclone flooding in coastal North Carolina, USA: Long-term observations suggest a regime shift," published July 23 in Nature Research's Three storms in the past 20 years -- hurricanes Floyd, Matthew and Florence -- resulted in abnormally large floods. The probability of these three flooding events occurring in such a short time period is 2%, according to the study.This frequency suggests that "three extreme floods resulting from high rainfall tropical cyclone events in the past 20 years is a consequence of the increased moisture carrying capacity of tropical cyclones due to the warming climate," the study said.In addition to the growing number of storms and floods, an increasing global population is compounding the problem by driving up emissions of greenhouse gases, leading to increases in ocean temperature, evaporation and subsequent increases in precipitation associated with tropical cyclones.North Carolina has seen an increase in unprecedentedly high rainfall since the late 1990s. The state also has seen an increase in higher rainfall from tropical cyclones over the past 120 years, according to the study."The price we're paying is that we're having to cope with increasing levels of catastrophic flooding," Paerl said. "Coastal watersheds are having to absorb more rain. Let's go back to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which flooded half of the coastal plain of North Carolina. Then, we had Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Just recently we had Hurricane Florence in 2018. These events are causing a huge amount of human suffering, economic and ecological damage."Part of that damage comes from how frequently storms hit the coast, Paerl said. This frequency means communities and ecosystems are challenged with rebuilding and rebounding before the next storm hits. The storms themselves don't have to be intense, massive hurricanes, Paerl said. A Category 1 storm with intensive rainfall can cause huge amounts of damage.The increasing rainfall means more runoff going into estuarine and coastal waters, like the Neuse River Estuary, and downstream Pamlico Sound, the USA's second largest estuarine complex and a key Southeast fisheries nursery. More runoff means more organic matter and nutrient losses from soil erosion, farmland and animal operations, urban centers and flushing of swamps and wetlands. This scenario increases the overloading of organic matter and nutrients that ecosystems can't process quickly enough to avoid harmful algal blooms, hypoxia, fish and shellfish kills.Additionally, North Carolina's population is growing. The state has more than 10.3 million residents, according to 2018 U.S. Census data. In 1990, North Carolina had 6.6 million residents."We are in part responsible for what's going on in the context of fossil fuel combustion emissions that are leading to global warming," Paerl said. "The ocean is a huge reservoir that is absorbing heat and seeing more evaporation. With more evaporation comes more rainfall."Previous research from Paerl's team has shown that heavy rainfall events and tropical storms lead to more organic materials being transferred from land to ocean. As those materials are processed and decomposed by estuarine and coastal waters, more carbon dioxide is generated and vented back up into the atmosphere, where it can add to already rising carbon dioxide levels. These effects can last for weeks to months after a storm's passage."We can help minimize the harmful effects of a 'new normal' of wetter storm events," Paerl said. "Curbing losses of organic matter and nutrients by vegetative buffers around farmlands and developed areas prone to storm water runoff, minimizing development in floodplains and avoiding fertilizer applications during hurricane season, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are positive steps which we can all contribute to." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
June 13, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190613133724.htm | Early-season hurricanes result in greater transmission of mosquito-borne infectious disease | The timing of a hurricane is one of the primary factors influencing its impact on the spread of mosquito-borne infectious diseases such as West Nile Virus, dengue, chikungunya and Zika, according to a study led by Georgia State University. | Researchers from Georgia State and Arizona State University developed a mathematical model to study the impact of heavy rainfall events (HREs) such as hurricanes on the transmission of vector-borne infectious diseases in temperate areas of the world, including the southern coastal U.S. In the aftermath of this type of extreme weather event, the mosquito population often booms in the presence of stagnant water. At the same time, the breakdown of public and private health infrastructure can put people at increased risk of infection. The study, which was published in According to the study, an HRE that occurs on July 1 results in 70 percent fewer disease cases compared to an HRE that occurs on June 1."Mosquitos are very sensitive to temperature not only in terms of their ability to survive and reproduce, but also in their ability to infect individuals," said Gerardo Chowell, professor of mathematical epidemiology in the School of Public Health and lead author of the study. "The warmer it is, the faster an infected mosquito will be able to transmit the virus. Considering that mosquitos have an average lifespan of less than two weeks, that temperature difference can have a dramatic effect on disease outbreaks."Population displacement can also affect the spread of vector-borne disease in a few ways, the researchers found. When people opt to leave the area, it reduces the number of local infections, while potentially increasing the number of infections elsewhere. However, those individuals who are not displaced during an HRE may be at higher risk because standard measures to combat mosquito breeding (such as removing pools of stagnant water) are neglected when fewer people remain in the area. And as people move into a disaster area to offer emergency relief -- or when they return after the event -- the number of local infections rises."Since mosquito-borne diseases tend to be spread by the movement of people rather than the movement of mosquitoes, disaster-induced movements of people can shift where and when outbreaks occur," said Charles Perrings, professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and a co-author of the study.Chowell notes that as HREs become more frequent in the southern U.S. and other tropical areas there's a need to develop further quantitative tools to assess how these disasters can affect the risk of disease transmission."Our team will now focus on improving methods to quantify the number of people that actually leave during a hurricane, how quickly they leave and when they return," he says. "We are also looking at additional hurricanes to study the impact of different displacement patterns."Other authors of the study include Kenji Mizumoto, assistant professor at Kyoto University and former post-doctoral researcher at Georgia State, Juan Banda, assistant professor of computer science at Georgia State and Silvestro Poccia, a visiting Ph.D. student at Arizona State.The study was supported by grant number 1414374 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the joint NSF-National Institutes of Health-U.S. Department of Agriculture Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Program. It was also supported by NSF grants 1610429 and 1633381, and Horizon 2020 grant number 690817. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
June 4, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190604131241.htm | New approach optimizes use of future wave electricity generators during disaster | When hurricanes strike, loss of electricity ranks as one of the top concerns for relief workers. Blackouts lasting a week or more can hamper recovery efforts, shutter hospitals, threaten public health and disrupt transportation. The monthslong effort to restore power to Puerto Rico following the 2017 hurricane season has led to renewed interest in finding innovative ways to get affected power grids back online. | New work described in the Researcher Umesh Korde found steady linear improvement to infrastructure might not be the fastest way to get affected areas back online. He said mobile electricity-generating ocean platforms could be brought to such locations by sea to restore energy to those impacted areas more quickly.Using variational calculus, Korde found if mobile electricity-generating ocean devices can become a reality, it appears a quicker recovery path could be achieved through daisy chaining multiple wave energy devices with a temporary connection to shore."The question is, among all the different functions of time, what's the function that minimizes the total length of time that it takes to get sufficient power to restart the power grid for an island?" he said.As a hurricane strikes, damage to an area's power grid prompts other areas in the national grid to pitch in electricity. A relatively small, isolated grid on an island like Puerto Rico might lack access to a nearby functioning grid and experience a complete shutdown."What you see in many cases is that they don't have access to enough spare electricity to turn themselves back on," Korde said. "We might just need to provide enough to 'black-start' that grid."For now, however, the optimization Korde has calculated remains a tentative plan pending availability of the correct technology. A handful of wave generator projects produce electricity around the world, but these generators are not mobile enough to quickly deploy after hurricanes.Korde hopes his paper helps provide researchers looking to improve wave generator technology with a broader scope of how their technology can be used to meet the pressing needs of disaster areas. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
June 3, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190603124715.htm | Evidence of multiple unmonitored coal ash spills found in N.C. lake | Coal ash solids found in sediments collected from Sutton Lake in 2015 and 2018 suggest the eastern North Carolina lake has been contaminated by multiple coal ash spills, most of them apparently unmonitored and unreported until now. | "Our results clearly indicate the presence of coal ash at the bottom of Sutton Lake and suggest there have been multiple coal ash spills into the lake from adjacent coal ash storage facilities after, and even before, floodwaters from Hurricane Florence caused major flooding in 2018," said Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, who led the research."The levels of coal ash contaminants we detected in Sutton Lake's sediments, including metals with known environmental impacts, are similar to or higher than what was found in stream sediments contaminated by the 2008 Tennessee Valley Authority coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee, or the 2014 Dan River spill here in North Carolina," Vengosh said.Sutton Lake served as an impoundment for a Duke Energy coal-fired power plant from the 1970s until the plant was retired and replaced with a natural gas-powered plant in 2013. It is located on the Cape Fear River about 11 miles upstream from the city of Wilmington, and is now widely used for recreational boating and fishing. In September 2018, floodwaters from Hurricane Florence inundated the lake and an adjacent coal ash landfill before flowing back into the Cape Fear.Coal ash has long been known to contain high levels of toxic and carcinogenic elements that can pose ecological and human health risks if they leak into the environment. Power plants in the United States generate about 100 million tons of the ash a year. About half of it is stored in landfills or impoundments, in most cases adjacent to waterways."What's happened at Sutton Lake highlights the risk of large-scale unmonitored spills occurring at coal ash storage sites nationwide. This is particularly true in the Southeast where we see many major land-falling tropical storms and have a large number of coal ash impoundments located in areas vulnerable to flooding," Vengosh said.While several lines of evidence suggest the coal ash solids found in Sutton Lake originate from multiple spills, further analysis will be needed to determine the timeline of these events and if similar unmonitored spills have also happened in other lakes near coal ash ponds in North Carolina, Vengosh said.The spills could have been caused by floods, he noted, but other causes such as accidental release or past dumping practices cannot be ruled out.He and his colleagues published their peer-reviewed study May 24 in the journal To do the study, they conducted four independent sets of laboratory tests on bottom sediments collected in October 2018 from seven sites in Sutton Lake and three sites in the adjacent Cape Fear River. They also analyzed three sediment samples collected from Sutton Lake in 2015 and three more collected that same year from nearby Lake Waccamaw, which has never served as a coal ash impoundment.The researchers analyzed each sample using four different methods for detecting and measuring the possible presence of coal ash solids -- magnetic susceptibility, visual observation of microscopic coal ash particles, trace element distributions, and strontium isotope ratios.The tests revealed high levels of coal ash solids mixed with natural sediments in the samples collected from Sutton Lake in both 2018 and 2015.Among the contaminants detected were many metals -- including arsenic, selenium and thalium, once used as rat poison -- that have toxic impacts at elevated levels. The metals are naturally found in coal and are enriched in coal-ash residuals when the coal is burned.Past studies by Vengosh's lab have shown that some of these metals, such as arsenic, can be released from coal ash solids into water trapped between grains of sediment at the lake's bottom, where they build up and, over time, bioaccumulate up the local food web. A 2017 study by Duke University Ph.D. student Jessica Brandt revealed that 85% of all fish tissue samples collected from Sutton Lake still contained selenium at levels that exceeded Environmental Protection Agency standards four years after the coal-fired power plant there was retired. Another study showed that strontium isotope ratios in the inner ears of fish from Sutton Lake now mirror the ratios found in coal ash."A coal ash spill is not a one-time contamination," Vengosh said. "It builds up a legacy in the environment. Even if you close the site, the legacy and threat remain, as our research has revealed at Sutton Lake and other coal ash spill sites such as Kingston, Tennessee. Collectively, these findings imply that the distribution and impact of coal ash in the environment is far larger than previously thought."The new study was supported by Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. No external funding was sought.Vengosh collaborated with Ellen Cowan, professor of geological and environmental sciences at Appalachian State University, on the study. His other coauthors were Rachel Coyte, Andrew Kondash, Zhen Wang, Jessica Brandt and Gary Dwyer, all of Duke. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
May 24, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190524130237.htm | Dead roots double shoreline loss in Gulf | A new Duke University-led study finds that the death of marsh plants due to disturbances like the heavy oiling from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill can double the rate of shoreline erosion in hard-hit marshes. | "The results from our field experiment unequivocally show that the loss of wetland vegetation increases the rate of erosion on wave-stressed shorelines by 100%," said Brian R. Silliman, Rachel Carson Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment."These findings are going to make it hard for oil companies whose spills kill marsh grasses or mangroves on the edge of coastal wetlands to say that the loss of plants due to heavy oiling doesn't have a long-term effect," he said.Some industry-sponsored scientists have theorized that the increased erosion of Louisiana marshes following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill didn't stem from the spill itself. They say that Hurricane Katrina, which struck the coast five years earlier, was already causing the marshes to erode faster and that plant loss from the oil spill played a negligible role."Our study refutes that claim," Silliman said. "We're not saying that soil type and hurricane-driven wave action don't affect marsh-edge erosion rates too, but our findings clearly show that the loss of plant roots compounds everything else and accelerates erosion even further."Silliman and his colleagues published their peer-reviewed paper May 23 in To test the competing theories, they conducted a three-year field experiment at salt marsh sites in Florida with similar soils, vegetation and wave exposure as marshes that were hit by the Deepwater Horizon spill.The researchers divided the sites into test plots of different sizes and subjected plots of each size to three different treatments. In some plots, they repeatedly cut the plants' stems down to the ground but left the roots intact. In other plots, they used herbicide to kill the plants, roots and all. Other plots were left unaltered to serve as controls where researchers could measure the base rate of erosion caused by wave action."In plots where we just cut off the stems, no extra erosion over the base rate occurred because the roots were still there to help hold things together. But in plots where we killed the roots too, the amount of land loss increased by 100 percent," Silliman said."The size of the test plot didn't matter. Wherever we started killing roots, that's where erosion started happening," he said.An analysis of other recent peer-reviewed studies on marsh erosion corroborated the team's findings and confirmed that the amount of land loss in an affected marsh is directly proportional to the amount of root loss."These small-scale experiments confirmed what we found in large-scale observational studies across hundreds of kilometers of heavily oiled marshes in Louisiana following the Deepwater Horizon spill," Silliman said. "If a disturbance like heavy oiling kills the roots, increased erosion occurs. The more roots killed, the more erosion. And because the eroded area is much lower in elevation and is flooded continuously, the plants can't grow back. The land has been converted into sea.""Coastal wetlands offer protection from storm surges and other extreme weather and climate events," said David Garrison, a program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research. "This paper is an important step in understanding the resilience of these important ecosystems."Various sources have estimated that between 15,000 and 24,000 acres of Gulf Coast salt marshes experienced plant stem oiling above a 90% threshold as a result of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Previous research led by Silliman has shown that 90% is the tipping point at which root death occurs and recovery is no longer possible."Given the vital roles coastal salt marshes play in protecting shorelines from erosion and flooding, providing habitat for wildlife and helping clean our water, we need to better understand the thresholds of salt marsh resilience to human disturbances like oil," Silliman said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
May 20, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115709.htm | Preparing low-income communities for hurricanes begins with outreach | Governments seeking to help their most vulnerable residents prepare for hurricanes and other disasters should create community-based information campaigns ahead of time, according to a Rutgers study of economically disadvantaged New Jerseyans in the areas hardest hit by Superstorm Sandy. | The study, published in the journal The researchers, at multiple Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences institutions, interviewed 599 people at federally qualified health centers, which serve uninsured and underinsured residents, in the counties most heavily damaged by Sandy. The 2019 Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1."When governments create disaster response strategies, it is essential that they understand how people in affected communities will actually prepare for and experience these events," said lead researcher Joanna Burger, a professor of biology at Rutgers-New Brunswick's School of Arts and Sciences, the Rutgers Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute and the Rutgers School of Public Health. "Our study of economically vulnerable individuals affected by Hurricane Sandy yields important tips on how emergency planners can prepare for disaster impacts in underprivileged communities."Some respondents said small grocery stores in their neighborhoods ran out of canned goods and water before Sandy's arrival, which made post-storm conditions more difficult. Some said they went to shelters that were under-equipped to provide appropriate food for people with diabetes, or that children with asthma were stuck in water-damaged residences with increasing mold problems.Citing the respondents' experiences before and after Sandy and their concerns about future disasters, the report offers the following recommendations for emergency planners seeking to help economically vulnerable residents:"Government and non-governmental agencies can consider these insights now -- that is, before the next hurricane. Many of these ideas could be implemented easily. It was enlightening to learn that the majority of respondents plan to take personal action to reduce their risk, and are prepared to listen to governmental advice on how to protect themselves and their families," Burger said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
May 15, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190508093721.htm | As climate changes, small increases in rainfall may cause widespread road outages | As more rain falls on a warming planet, a new computer model shows that it may not take a downpour to cause widespread disruption of road networks. The model combined data on road networks with the hills and valleys of topography to reveal "tipping points" at which even small localized increases in rain cause widespread road outages. | The findings, which were tested using data from the impact of Hurricane Harvey on the Houston area, were published today in "To prepare for climate change, we have to know where flooding leads to the biggest disruptions in transportation routes. Network science typically points to the biggest interactions, or the most heavily traveled routes. That's not what we see here," said Jianxi Gao, an assistant professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and lead author of the study. "A little bit of flood-induced damage can cause abrupt widespread failures."Gao, a network scientist, worked with environmental scientists at Beijing Normal University and a physicist at Boston University to reconcile traditional network science models that predict how specific disruptions impact a road network with environmental science models that predict how topography influences flooding. Traditional network science predicts continuous levels of damage, in which case knocking out minor roads or intersections would cause only minor damage to the network. But because of how water flows over land, adding topographical information yields a more accurate prediction.In Florida, an increase from 30mm to 35mm of rainfall knocked out 50 percent of the road network. And in New York, Gao found that runoff greater than 45mm isolated the northeastern part of the state from the interior of the United States.In the Hunan province of China, an increase from 25mm to 30mm of rainfall knocked out 42 percent of the provincial road network. In the Sichuan province, an increase from 95mm to 100mm in rainfall knock out 48.7 percent of the provincial road network. And overall, and an increase from 160mm to 165mm of rainfall knocked out 17.3 percent of road network in China and abruptly isolated the western part of mainland China.The researchers validated their model by comparing predicted results with observed road outages in Houston and South East Texas caused by Hurricane Harvey. Their model predicted 90.6 percent of reported road closures and 94.1 percent of reported flooded streets."We cracked the data. Hurricane Harvey caused some of the most extensive road outages in U.S. history, and our model predicted that damage," Gao said. "Adding 3D information causes more unusual failure patterns than we expected, but now we have developed the mathematical equations to predict those patterns."Gao was joined in the research by Weiping Wang and Saini Yang of Beijing Normal University, and H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University. At Rensselaer, the research was funded by the Office of Naval Research, and a grant from the Knowledge and Innovation Program at Rensselaer. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
April 30, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190430105738.htm | Psychologists release results of survey of 'Maria generation' kids | Psychologists from the Medical University of South Carolina have just published one of the largest post-disaster screening projects in U.S. history. The report, available online through | Rosaura Orengo-Aguayo, an assistant professor at MUSC in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, grew up in Puerto Rico and led the study. "More than seven percent of youth, 6,900 of the children surveyed by the Puerto Rico Department of Education, reported clinically significant symptoms of PTSD," she said.Post-traumatic stress disorder can develop after a traumatic event, such as a natural disaster, affecting their ability to cope with everyday life. PTSD can cause nightmares, flashbacks, the feeling of being always on guard, trouble sleeping and an inability to remember parts of the traumatic event.Other key findings of the survey, in which more than 96,000 third through 12th graders took part:Orengo-Aguayo said the survey also found that more than 6,000 children reported a family member, friend or neighbor may have died as a result of the storm. "What students reported aligns with an article in the New England Journal of Medicine on mortality rates after Hurricane Maria." That article, by researchers at the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, estimated there were about 4,600 deaths related to the storm. The government of Puerto Rico puts the death toll at about 3,000 people.While more than 7% of the children surveyed had PTSD symptoms, that's actually lower than anticipated. Regan Stewart, an assistant professor in MUSC's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, is part of the research team. "I expected it to be higher, based on other studies that have been done in the mainland U.S. in which rates are somewhere between 13 and 30%."Why would the PTSD rate be lower among the children surveyed in Puerto Rico than their mainland counterparts surveyed after other disasters? Stewart said one potential protective factor may be a concept called "familismo" in Spanish. "It's the importance of family and community. Puerto Ricans place a high value on these social connections. We know from the literature that social support may be a protective factor after a traumatic event."The PTSD rate might also have to do with the timing of when the Puerto Rico Department of Education conducted the survey, she said. "Most surveys have been done at the six to 12-month mark, given all it takes to get this funded and done. In this case, the department administered the surveys at five to nine months, which is sooner. Many of the students were still dealing with losses of basic necessities-food, electricity. Their focus could still be on getting these basic needs met and mental health difficulties may have developed later at the six to 12-month mark, which was not captured in this survey."Orengo-Aguayo, Stewart and another bilingual MUSC mental health expert, Michael de Arellano, have been part of the effort to help schoolchildren in the aftermath of Maria almost from the beginning.Soon after the storm, a friend in Puerto Rico told Orengo-Aguayo that the education secretary was looking for people who could come up with a comprehensive plan to help teachers and students deal with Maria's aftermath. Schools were closed, utilities were out and loved ones were leaving.Orengo-Aguayo and her colleagues at MUSC, along with a psychology intern from Puerto Rico, sprang into action. They realized they could use a grant they already had from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network to fund the work in Puerto Rico.They've worked with the Puerto Rico Department of Education to train teachers in how to take care of their own mental health while also caring for the kids who weathered the storm.Since their first visit in October of 2017, the MUSC psychologists have been back multiple times to continue their work. They emphasize the importance of asking what people need instead of telling Puerto Ricans what to do. They've also worked closely with Joy Lynn Suarez-Kindy, a clinical psychologist who lives there, to strategize and analyze what is needed.Orengo-Aguayo said the survey shows a few things in addition to data. One, more funding is needed to pay for mental health services in Puerto Rico. Two, the island needs better ways to reach people in rural areas that don't have mental health providers around. Telehealth, which uses technology to connect patients with experts, is one possibility being explored. Three, all storm-prone areas should try to assess what mental health resources they have before a future disaster occurs, not after.She also wants to make sure people on the mainland U.S. don't forget about their fellow citizens in Puerto Rico, including children. "Puerto Rican youth experienced significant disaster exposure and reported trauma symptoms that warrant evidence-based services. Academics partnering with community stakeholders is the way to go to change the world one child at a time. That is our lab's motto." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
April 22, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190422131539.htm | Wristband samplers show similar chemical exposure across three continents | To assess differences and trends in personal chemical exposure, Oregon State University researchers deployed chemical-sampling wristbands to individuals on three continents. | After they analyzed the wristbands that were returned, they found that no two wristbands had identical chemical detections. But the same 14 chemicals were detected in more than 50 percent of the wristbands returned from the United States, Africa and South America."Whether you are a farmworker in Senegal or a preschooler in Oregon, you might be exposed to those same 14 chemicals that we detected in over 50 percent of the wristbands," said Holly Dixon, a doctoral candidate at Oregon State and the study's lead author.The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is published in the journal This study demonstrates that the wristbands, which absorb chemicals from the air and skin, are an excellent screening tool for population exposures to organic chemicals, said Kim Anderson, an OSU environmental chemist and leader of the research team. It's notable, she said, that most of the 14 common chemicals aren't heavily studied."Some of these are not on our radar, yet they represent an enormous exposure," she said. "If we want to understand the impact of chemical exposures, this was very enlightening."Anderson and her team invented the wristband samplers several years ago. They have been used in other studies, including one that measured Houston residents' exposure in floodwaters after Hurricane Harvey.In this study, 242 volunteers from 14 communities in four countries -- the United States, Senegal, South Africa and Peru -- wore a total of 262 wristbands. The Houston residents were included in the study.Oregon State researchers analyzed the wristbands for 1,530 unique organic chemicals. The number of chemical detections ranged from four to 43 per wristband, with 191 different chemicals detected. And 1,339 chemicals weren't detected in any wristband. They detected 36 chemicals in common in the United States, South America and Africa.Because the wristbands don't measure chemical levels, the study authors didn't make any conclusions regarding health risks posed by the wearers of wristbands. But certain levels of chemical exposures are associated with adverse health outcomes.For example, exposure to certain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) has been associated with cancer, self-regulatory capacity issues, low birth weight and respiratory distress. These chemicals were found in many of the wristbands.Exposure to specific flame retardants, which were found in wristbands in the U.S. and South America, has been associated with cancer, neurotoxicity and cardiotoxicity.And exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) has been linked to health effects such as low semen quality, adverse pregnancy outcomes and endocrine-related cancers.The researchers detected 13 potential EDCs in more than half of all the wristbands.Other notable findings in the study included:Toxicological and epidemiological studies often focus on one chemical or chemical class, yet people are exposed to complex chemical mixtures, rather than to a single chemical or an individual chemical class. The results reveal common chemical mixtures across several communities that can be prioritized for future study, Dixon said.The study authors noted two significant limitations. They relied on a convenience sample of volunteers and did not randomly recruit participants, so the chemical exposures they reported may not be representative of all chemical exposures in the 14 communities.Also, deployment length varied depending on the specific project. But they didn't detect a difference in the number of chemicals detected based on how long a participant wore a wristband. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
April 16, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190416132153.htm | Climate change to blame for Hurricane Maria's extreme rainfall | Hurricane Maria dropped more rain on Puerto Rico than any storm to hit the island since 1956, a feat due mostly to the effects of human-caused climate warming, new research finds. | A new study analyzing Puerto Rico's hurricane history finds 2017's Maria had the highest average rainfall of the 129 storms to have struck the island in the past 60 years. A storm of Maria's magnitude is nearly five times more likely to form now than during the 1950s, an increase due largely to the effects of human-induced warming, according to the study's authors."What we found was that Maria's magnitude of peak precipitation is much more likely in the climate of 2017 when it happened versus the beginning of the record in 1950," said David Keellings, a geographer at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and lead author of the new study in AGU's journal Previous studies have attributed Hurricane Harvey's record rainfall to climate change, but no one had yet looked in depth at rainfall from Maria, which struck Puerto Rico less than a month after Harvey devastated Houston and the Gulf Coast. Extreme rainfall during both storms caused unprecedented flooding that placed them among the top three costliest hurricanes on record (the other being Hurricane Katrina in 2005).The new study adds to the growing body of evidence that human-caused warming is making extreme weather events like these more common, according to the authors."Some things that are changing over the long-term are associated with climate change -- like the atmosphere getting warmer, sea surface temperatures increasing, and more moisture being available in the atmosphere -- together they make something like Maria more likely in terms of its magnitude of precipitation," Keellings said.José Javier Hernández Ayala, a climate researcher at Sonoma State University in California and co- author of the new study, is originally from Puerto Rico and his family was directly impacted by Hurricane Maria. After the storm, Hernández Ayala decided to team up with Keellings to see how unusual Maria was compared to previous storms that have struck the island.The researchers analyzed rainfall from the 129 hurricanes that have struck Puerto Rico since 1956, the earliest year with records they could rely on. They found Hurricane Maria produced the largest maximum daily rainfall of those 129 storms: a whopping 1,029 millimeters (41 inches) of rain. That places Maria among the top 10 wettest hurricanes to ever have hit United States territory."Maria is more extreme in its precipitation than anything else that the island has ever seen," Keellings said. "I just didn't expect that it was going to be so much more than anything else that's happened in the last 60 years."Keellings and Hernández Ayala also wanted to know whether Maria's extreme rain was a result of natural climate variability or longer-term trends like human-induced warming. To do so, they analyzed the likelihood of an event like Maria happening in the 1950s versus today.They found an extreme event like Maria was 4.85 times more likely to happen in the climate of 2017 than in 1956, and that change in probability can't be explained by natural climate cycles.At the beginning of the observational record in the 1950s, a storm like Maria was likely to drop that much rain once every 300 years. But in 2017, that likelihood dropped to about once every 100 years, according to the study."Due to anthropogenic climate change it is now much more likely that we get these hurricanes that drop huge amounts of precipitation," Keellings said.The findings show human influence on hurricane precipitation has already started to become evident, according to Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, who was not connected to the new study. Because so much of Maria's damage was due to flooding from the extreme amount of rain, it is safe to say that part of those damages were exacerbated by climate change, Wehner said."Extreme precipitation during tropical cyclones has been increased by climate change," he said. "Not all storms have a large amount of inland flooding, of freshwater flooding. But of those that do, the floods are increased to some extent by climate change." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
April 10, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190410095942.htm | Hurricane Harvey provides lessons learned for flood resiliency plans | Hurricane Harvey made landfall on Aug. 25, 2017, then stalled over Texas for three days as a tropical storm. The category-four storm claimed 80 lives, displaced multitudes of people, and damaged more than 80,000 homes. | ASU researcher Manoochehr Shirzaei of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and former graduate student and lead author Megan Miller (now a postdoctoral researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology) used satellite data to map the Houston-Galveston area impacted by Hurricane Harvey to understand why the flooding was so severe and widespread. The results of their study have been recently published in the journal For their study, Miller and Shirzaei mapped the Eastern Texas area of Houston-Galveston impacted by Hurricane Harvey using satellite radar data collected from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 A/B satellites and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Advanced Land Observing Satellite. From this data, Miller and Shirzaei then compiled a snapshot of the extent of standing water in the area following the hurricane.They also measured land subsidence (how much the land surface moves downward) for the area before the storm using space-borne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), a radar technique used to generate maps of surface deformation using differences in the phase of the waves returning to the satellite. The technique can measure millimeter-scale changes in deformation over spans of days to years."Earth-orbiting radar satellites provide us with an opportunity to map areas when other techniques fail due to cloud coverage and lack of ground access to the area of the disaster," says Miller.In analyzing the satellite data, Miller and Shirzaei were surprised to see that large flooded areas fell outside the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) designated 500-year flood zones. "This highlights the need for revising both flood hazard zone maps and flood resilience plans in coastal regions," warns Shirzaei.Through this analysis, they found land subsidence in the Houston-Galveston area of more than 0.19 inches (5 millimeters) per year in 85 percent of the flooded area. The likely causes of subsidence include compaction of sediments, groundwater extraction and hydrocarbon production.They concluded that the area's subsidence affected flood severity by modifying base flood elevations and topographic gradients. "Ongoing land subsidence across the Houston area possibly lowered the flood control structures and changed floodplain boundaries and base flood drainage, which further intensified flooding," says Shirzaei."In an era of climate change, weather extremes are becoming more frequent and intense," adds Shirzaei. "The combination of extreme rainfall and ground conditions are causing unprecedented flood events not only in coastal areas like Houston-Galveston, but also in Midwestern states where farmers have experienced damage to livestock and agriculture, stretching from Illinois to Louisiana."While risk classification maps used by FEMA provide flood hazard data, this study shows that land elevation and slope are changing rapidly and these maps may need to be updated more frequently to account for such changes.Also, land subsidence lowers coastal lands and makes them more vulnerable to flooding due to sea level rise and storm surges."The lessons learned from the floods following Hurricane Harvey highlight the major shortcomings of current flood resilience plans," says Shirzaei. "We encourage stakeholders and regulators to use these findings to update hazard maps and improve flood resiliency plans accordingly to decide what precautionary measures are needed for their communities."On the horizon, Shirzaei and his research team are using the same satellite data techniques used in this study to focus on the Spring 2019 flooding that has devastated Midwestern states. They will be looking specifically at the impact of flooding on agriculture crop health and the local population. They hope to be able to provide recommendations on updating maps and resiliency plans to help these areas in the future. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
March 25, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190325112254.htm | Continued PTSD in women exposed to deepwater horizon oil spill | A study led by LSU Health New Orleans School of Public Health reports that women exposed to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon (BP) Oil Spill continue to experience symptoms of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The results are published in the | "This is the first investigation reporting trauma and PTSD in our Louisiana cohort, with findings suggesting that women in this study report notably high levels of trauma as well as a high prevalence of probable PTSD," notes study senior author Edward Peters, DMD, SM, SM, ScD, Professor and Program Director of Epidemiology at LSU Health New Orleans School of Public Health. "Unfortunately, less than half reported receiving past-year mental health treatment despite the high levels of PTSD symptoms, which suggests that many affected women may not be receiving needed mental health care."The research team, which also included researchers from Brown University, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and Brigham and Women's Hospital, studied 1,997 women from seven coastal Louisiana parishes affected by the spill (Orleans, St. Bernard, Jefferson, Plaquemines, Lafourche, Terrebonne and St. Mary) who were enrolled in the Women and Their Children's Health (WaTCH) Study. The researchers sought to better understand post-disaster symptomatology, particularly women's mental health. They found five distinct types of PTSD symptoms -- low, moderate without mood alterations, moderate with mood alterations, severe without risk-taking, and severe with risk-taking.Findings also include:The researchers' analysis reveals that a sizable number of women in WaTCH study communities suffer from PTSD symptoms, with roughly 13% of their sample meeting or exceeding the score threshold for probable PTSD on the PTSD Checklist, and even more women reporting subthreshold levels of PTSD symptoms."Our study continues to observe that women in southeast Louisiana have a high burden of mental health disorders," adds Dr. Peters. "In addition to the current study, earlier publications by our team have also observed high levels of depression and mental distress in this population."The authors conclude that addressing mental health and access to mental health care is important in the population highly affected by the BP Oil Spill. This population also experienced other disasters, including Hurricane Katrina. With a rising number of disasters, those living in southeastern coastal Louisiana, a particularly vulnerable region of the United States, are at higher risk for PTSD and other mental health disorders.The authors report that the study was limited by use of self-reported data and one-time assessment of PTSD symptoms. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
March 25, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190325080429.htm | Hurricane Maria study warns: Future climate-driven storms may raze many tropical forests | A new study shows that damage inflicted on trees in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria was unprecedented in modern times, and suggests that more frequent big storms whipped up by a warming climate could permanently alter forests not only here, but across much of the Atlantic tropics. Biodiversity could suffer as result, and more carbon could be added to the atmosphere, say the authors. The study appears this week in the journal | Hurricane Maria not only destroyed far more trees than any previously studied storm; big, old trees thought to be especially resistant to storms suffered the worst. Lead author Maria Uriarte, a faculty member of Columbia University's Earth Institute, said that because hurricanes are projected to intensify with warming climate, the damage probably presages more such events. "These hurricanes are going to kill more trees. They're going to break more trees. The factors that protected many trees in the past will no longer apply," she said. "Forests will become shorter and smaller, because they won't have time to regrow, and they will be less diverse."When Maria hit Puerto Rico in October 2017, it came in as a Category 4, with winds up to 155 miles per hour and up to three feet of rain in places. Many trees were denuded of foliage, snapped in half or blown clear out of the ground. The strongest storm to hit the island since 1928, Maria killed or severely damaged an estimated 20 million to 40 million trees.Uriarte, who has been monitoring tree growth and mortality across Puerto Rico for the past 15 years, returned soon after the hurricane and began documenting its effects. For the new study, she and two colleagues homed in on a 40-acre section of the El Yunque National Forest, near the capital of San Juan, that has been intensively monitored by multiple teams since 1990. This long-term monitoring allowed Uriarte and her colleagues to compare damage from Maria with that of past hurricanes, including 1989's Hurricane Hugo and 1998's Hurricane Georges -- Category 3 storms, but the only things even close to Maria in recent times.They found that Maria killed twice as many trees outright as previous storms, and broke more than three times as many trunks. Some species suffered much worse, with breakage rates up to 12 times those of previous storms. Alarmingly, these tended to be the slowest-growing, most valuable hardwoods that in the past were the most resilient to big storms: towering mahogany-like tabonucos with great crowns, prized for furniture and boat-building, and thick ausubos, whose wood is so dense it does not float in water. These and other big trees provide habitat for many birds and other creatures that smaller trees do not. About half of the trees with broken trunks will die within two to three years, said Uriarte.However, a few species did well in all the storms, and one stood out: the common sierra palm, whose slender, flexible trunk bends with wind and quickly resprouts, grass-like, from its top if it loses foliage. Uriarte believes that the palms and a few pioneer species that can take root quickly and grow following storms may be the future of forests across the Atlantic tropics and subtropics. "This will yield lower statured and less diverse forests dominated by a few resistant species," she said.Tropical cyclones derive their energy from ocean heat. Atlantic temperatures are already ascending, and models predict that by 2100, maximum sustained hurricane winds could increase by as much as 15 percent. Warmer air also carries more moisture, so rainfall could increase by up to 20 percent near storm centers. Both factors destroy trees; extreme winds do it directly, while rain saturates and destabilizes soil, encouraging uprooting. "The expected changes in hurricane winds and rainfall may have profound consequences for the long-term resilience of tropical forests in the North Atlantic basin," says the study.The potential loss of many tree species could have cascading effects on forest wildlife and plants, say the researchers. This also would probably alter forests' growth dynamics, such that instead of soaking in more atmospheric carbon than they give off -- which they currently do -- the equation would reverse, and forests would become net emitters. This would be because the decay of felled trees would outweigh carbon taken in by any replacements. Along with palms, one species that probably would take over would be the fast-growing yagrumo, which shoots up quickly in sunny clearings created by big storms. But the yagrumo also is often the first to fall in storms, and so would just add to the problem. Thus, forests would help feed the very warming that is destroying them. Separate estimates suggest that trees killed or damaged by Hurricane Maria alone will release about 5.75 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, or about 2.5 percent of the carbon taken up annually by all forests in the United States.Edmund Tanner, a senior lecturer emeritus at the University of Cambridge who studies tropical trees but was not involved in the new research, said the study is important, because "it reports different, rather than just intensified, effects of strong versus weaker hurricanes." Tanner said the effects are "probably representative of huge areas of tropical lowland forest near sea coasts, some of which are likely to experience similar or worse damage in a warming world." Maria "was a Category 4 hurricane," noted Tanner. "There is a Category 5."The study was coauthored by two researchers who have long worked in the El Yunque forest: Jill Thompson, a plant ecologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in the United Kingdom; and Jess K. Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
March 7, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190307103119.htm | Hurricane Maria had a significant impact on HIV care outcomes | Hurricane Maria in San Juan, Puerto Rico had a significant impact on HIV outcomes among people living with HIV and a history of substance use, particularly increased viral load and decreased CD4 counts, according to early data just released by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, University of Puerto Rico, University of Miami, Puerto Rico Department of Health, Iniciativa Comunitaria de Investigación at CROI 2019, at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, held this year in Seattle. The average viral load following the Hurricane was significantly (11%) higher compared to the pre-Hurricane Maria viral load assessment. | In 2017, Hurricane Maria caused devastation to the island of Puerto Rico and its residents but until now, the health impacts of this storm on vulnerable populations, including people living with HIV were unknown. The study, conducted in San Juan, also found that HIV care outcomes were related to the participants' pre-hurricane viral suppression status.Through a computer-assisted personal interview, the researchers studied a cohort of people living with HIV and a history of substance use from the San Juan Metropolitan Area using a social and behavioral assessment. They also collected blood samples to measure CD4 and viral load at the study launch and at 6-month follow-up visits, including time points before and after the Hurricane.Indicators such as homelessness, drug and alcohol use in the past 6 months, depression, physical abuse/interpersonal violence, access to care, and social support, among others, were also assessed.Viral suppression decreased from 71 percent to 65 percent across the sample as a result of the impacts of Hurricane Maria, and access to care was reduced by over 22 percent. Study participants who were not virally suppressed pre-Hurricane Maria had significantly less access to care and lower medication adherence, but made a greater number of hospital/clinic/outpatient visits post-Hurricane Maria compared to pre-Hurricane Maria."The impact of Hurricane Maria on people living with HIV with a history of substance use in San Juan was mixed," observed Diana Hernandez, PhD, first author and Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "But from our results it is clear to see the benefits of conducting further research that will help us understand divergent paths following natural disasters for vulnerable populations."Co-authors include Lisa R. Metsch, Pedro C. Castellón, Sandra Miranda de León, Glenda O. Davila-Torres, Yue Pan, Allan E. Rodriguez, Iveth G. Yanez, Mariela Maisonet Alejandro, Wilmarie L. Calderón Alicea, Gabriel Cardenas, Héctor Meléndez, Lauren Gooden, Daniel J. Feaster and Jorge Santana-Bagur. Weill Cornell Medical College (led by Bruce Schackman, PhD) is also collaborating on this study.The study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA035280). The study principal investigators are Lisa R. Metsch, PhD (Columbia University), Jorge Santana-Bagur, MD (University of Puerto Rico) and Sandra Miranda de Leon, MPH (Puerto Rico Department of Health). | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
March 4, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190304121500.htm | How bacteria can help prevent coal ash spills | Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a technique that uses bacteria to produce "biocement" in coal ash ponds, making the coal ash easier to store and limiting the risk of coal ash spills into surface waters. | Coal ash is produced by coal-fired power plants and is often stored in ponds. If the walls of these ponds fail, they can spill coal ash into nearby surface waters -- as happened in the wake of Hurricane Florence in 2018, in Virginia's Dan River in 2014, and in Tennessee in 2008. These spills can have significant consequences, because coal ash contains contaminants such as mercury and arsenic."Our goal with this work was to see whether we could use bacteria to create a biocement matrix in coal ash ponds, making the coal ash stiffer and easier to contain," says Brina Montoya, an assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State and co-author of two papers on the work.Specifically, the researchers wanted to make use of bacterial species that feed on urea and, in the presence of calcium, produce a stiff substance that binds to surrounding solids. The resulting byproduct is called biocement."The idea is to introduce these bacteria -- which are normally found in soil -- into coal ash ponds, along with urea and calcium," Montoya says. "The resulting biocement wouldn't make the coal ash completely solid, but it would be a lot more viscous than the existing coal ash slurry."In laboratory experiments, the researchers found that the process works with coal ash -- the bacteria create biocement using coal ash, and the coal ash slurry becomes stiffer. In other words, the coal ash mixture is much less runny."This will certainly make it easier to contain, and less likely to contribute to pond failures that discharge coal ash into surface waters," Montoya says.But the researchers are hoping that the bacterial biocement will also have a second benefit.Because most coal ash ponds are simply unlined holes in the ground, contaminants in the coal ash can leach into groundwater, raising environmental and public-health concerns. The researchers are hoping that the biocement can also trap potentially toxic metals in the coal ash -- though that work is ongoing."We still have a lot to do before this technique could be implemented on a large scale, but we would welcome any industry partners who are interested in helping us fine-tune the process for use in addressing the challenges surrounding coal ash storage," Montoya says. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
February 13, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190213142654.htm | In disasters, Twitter influencers get out-tweeted | New research on Twitter use during natural disasters offers potentially life-saving data about how information is disseminated in emergency situations, and by whom. | The University of Vermont study is the first to look at social media patterns across different disaster types (hurricanes, floods and tornadoes), focusing on five of the decade's costliest U.S. emergencies.The study highlights two key findings: First, on average, Twitter users with small local networks (with 100-200 followers) increase their activity more than those with larger networks in these situations. Second, each type of natural disaster studied possessed its very own unique pattern of social media use.The findings, published in the journal "In planning for natural hazards and disasters, thinking about when and what to tweet really does matter," says lead author Meredith Niles of UVM's Gund Institute for Environment and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "We show that social media use differs markedly depending on emergency type, and these insights can help with emergency planning, where effective communications can be a matter of life and death."Despite the importance placed on celebrity social media influencers with millions of followers, in natural disasters average Twitter users -- those with 100 to 200 followers -- were found to be more active disseminators of useful information."We found 'average Twitter users' tweeted more frequently about disasters, and focused on communicating key information," says study co-author Benjamin Emery, a Master student in UVM's Complex Systems Center and Computational Story Lab."While these users have fewer followers than so-called influencers, their followers tend to have a higher proportion of friends and family, close networks that are more likely to seek and exchange useful information in emergency situations."Instead of relying on high-profile social media influencers to help spread important information, the study suggests efforts should be concentrated on targeting average users with meaningful networks, with compelling, accurate messages that average people will feel compelled to share in the "social wild online."Researchers found key differences in tweet timing and volume, depending on disaster type. For hurricanes, people tweeted more frequently about emergency topics before the event, while for tornadoes and floods, which occur with less warning, Twitter was used for real-time or recovery information.The study suggests that the importance of Twitter for communicating potentially life-saving information could be maximized by tailoring the timing and content of messages to the emergency type."We show that people are much more active on Twitter just before a hurricane, when they know it's coming and they are preparing," says Niles, with activity dropping during the actual event. "This suggests that Twitter is most effective as a tool to communicate preparation or evacuation information in advance of hurricanes."However, with more unexpected hazards, such as tornadoes and flooding, people were tweeting in real time as the situation unfolds. "ln the case of floods and tornadoes, it appears that people are using Twitter to share critical information about resources in the immediate aftermath and recovery period," Niles adds.Given the importance of food and water during natural hazards, the researchers tracked 39 keywords related to emergencies, food security, water and resources and analyzed their frequency and volume increase across Twitter over the two weeks surrounding each disaster.For example, terms like "groceries," "supermarket," and "prepare" were most frequently used before hurricanes whereas terms like "shelter," "emergency," "wind" or "food security" were used during and after tornadoes. This suggests that people are communicating about their preparation or recovery in real-time and sharing resources that could assist those seeking help.The research was conducted under a standing agreement between the University of Vermont and Twitter that allows the university access to the Decahose (a random stream of 10 per cent of all public tweets made).Data from Twitter was collated from the five most costly time-bounded emergencies (excluding long-term droughts) in the U.S. between 2011 and 2016: Hurricane Sandy (October 2012), Hurricane Irene (August 2011), Southeast/Ohio Valley/Midwest tornadoes (April 2011), Louisiana flooding (August 2016), and Midwest/Southeast tornadoes (May 2011).Study co-authors include Gund Fellow Christopher Danforth, Peter Dodds and Andrew Reagan. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
February 7, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190207102632.htm | Landslides triggered by Hurricane Maria | Hurricane Maria hit the island of Puerto Rico on 20 September 2017 and triggered more than 40,000 landslides in at least three-fourths of Puerto Rico's 78 municipalities. In a new article from | The authors, from the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Puerto Rico, evaluate the extent and characteristics of Maria-induced landslides throughout Puerto Rico. They present an assessment of island-wide landslide density, which they compare, in conjunction with rainfall data, to tropical cyclone systems that have affected Puerto Rico since 1960. Additionally, they discuss the conditions specific to landsliding in Puerto Rico and examine the impact of environmental variables (e.g., rainfall, soil moisture, and geology) on observed variations in island-wide landsliding.In their analysis, they show that the average rainfall from Hurricane Maria in mountainous areas was greater than that of any other hurricane or tropical storm in Puerto Rico since 1960.An important aim of the study, the authors write, is to achieve a better understanding of the factors that cause landslides in Puerto Rico in order to enhance susceptibility analyses and risk management efforts. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
January 31, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190131104948.htm | Hurricane Katrina's aftermath included spike in heart disease hospitalizations | Natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornados, and hurricanes are generally described in terms of wind speed, land area, and inches of rain. They're also described in terms of human costs, such as the number of fatalities and injuries. Hurricane Katrina, for example, led to approximately 1,000 deaths in Louisiana, of which 75 percent were among adults age 60 or above. | What are the hidden health costs, though, that might not be reported immediately, but which are a result of a natural disaster? Some studies have looked at stress disorders, but a new study from researchers and scholars at Tufts University examined changes in the number of cardiovascular disease (CVD) hospitalizations before and after Katrina, and the disparate effect of Katrina on black and white older adults in Louisiana.The co-first author on the study is Ninon Becquart, a former scholar in the NIH-funded Post-Baccalaureate Research Program (PREP) at Tufts who used R, SQL, and ArcMap to conduct sophisticated data analysis, including visualization. She was mentored on the research project by Elena Naumova, chair of the Division of Nutrition Data Science at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts."Our goal with this research was to contribute to a methodology to assess the impact of natural disasters," said Becquart. "We saw that rates spiked after Katrina's landfall in all older adults, especially in older black adults. The rates appear to stabilize about two months after landfall, which coincides with the clearing of floodwaters from New Orleans.""We can expect to see more natural disasters because of climate change. Our study is one of the few that addresses the impact of natural disasters on CVD hospitalization rates, as well as disparities in hospitalization rates between black and white older adults," said Naumova. "Considering the staggering social, economic, and health impacts of such disasters, we hope this study leads to more research and helps to inform emergency health preparedness."The research team focused on changes in the daily rates of cardiovascular hospitalizations (per 10,000) for adults aged 65 and older in three Louisiana parishes (counties), Orleans, Jefferson, and East Baton Rouge, over 710 days for the period from January 7, 2005 to December 17, 2006. They segmented the observation period to correspond to six time periods before, during, and after the arrival and departure of Katrina.Using data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the team assembled a database with daily hospitalization rates for all CVD hospitalizations in the three parishes over the 710 days. They added U.S. Census data supplemented by American Community Survey estimates to obtain demographic and population measures.Preliminary analysis included mapping the daily CVD rates across parishes and work with the data to identify the existing trend line for the CVD hospitalizations. They used the smoothed time series to define the six time segments and develop segmented linear regression models for the overall population in each parish and then separately for the black and the white populations.CVD hospitalization rates had been stable or declining in each parish, but -- in Orleans and Jefferson parishes -- rose precipitously immediately after landfall. This increase in CVD hospitalization rates was prolonged, lasting more than a month after landfall. Notably, the increase in CVD rates was higher among the older black population compared to the older white population, after landfall, indicating differences in the level of impact in these two populations.Over the study period, in East Baton Rouge Parish, CVD hospitalization rates were consistently higher on average for black adults, confirming what has been reported in the literature previously. No significant changes in CVD hospitalization rates were noted after landfall. The researchers speculate that this was because East Baton Rouge received more evacuees than parishes more directly hit by the hurricane, but also note that hospitals were overwhelmed and data might not be complete. In addition, they note that psychological stress has emerged as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.The 2017-18 hurricane seasons were particularly devastating, as storms like Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Jose ravaged major metropolitan hubs in Houston, Puerto Rico, and Dominica alongside the back-to-back disasters of Florence and Michael in Carolinas and Florida.The NIH-funded PREP program at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts is based on the idea that an enriched hands-on experience in research is the best preparation for additional training. It is designed to encourage students from under-represented groups to become research scientists. As a result of this project, and related coursework, Ninon has decided to focus on data analysis with the hopes of eventually completing a graduate degree in data science. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
January 22, 2019 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122084358.htm | Possible Oahu populations offer new hope for Hawaiian seabirds | The two seabird species unique to Hawaii, Newell's Shearwaters and Hawaiian Petrels, are the focus of major conservation efforts -- at risk from habitat degradation, invasive predators, and other threats, their populations plummeted 94% and 78% respectively between 1993 and 2013. However, a new study in | Shearwaters and petrels nest colonially in crevices, burrows, and under vegetation at mid to high elevations. They currently breed on other Hawaiian islands including Kauai and Maui, but were both believed to have extirpated from Oahu prior to European contact in 1778; biologists believed that occasional records from the island were birds thrown off-course at night by city lights.Pacific Rim Conservation's Lindsay Young and her colleagues used a spatial model based on elevation, forest cover, and illumination to identify potential suitable breeding habitat for both species on Oahu, then deployed automated acoustic recording units at 16 sites on the island to listen for the birds' calls in 2016 and 2017, accessing remote mountain locations via helicopter. To their surprise, they detected petrels at one site and shearwaters at two sites."We were doing a statewide survey for these species for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of recovery action planning, but Oahu was not initially included as one of the sites to survey, since evidence suggested they weren't there," says Young. "Since we're Oahu-based, we thought we would at least put a few recording units out to see if there was anything. And we were surprised, to say the least, that we not only had calls detected, but detected both species across two years."These could be the last survivors of remnant breeding populations on Oahu, or they could be young birds from other islands that are searching for mates and breeding sites. "Either way, it gives us hope that we will be able to use social attraction -- that is, using calls and decoys -- to attract them nest on an island where they were once abundant," says Young. Oahu birds could help boost connectivity between individual island populations and provide extra insurance in case any one island's seabird population is decimated by an event such as a hurricane. As petrel and shearwater numbers continue to decline, protecting Hawaii's remaining seabirds remains a major conservation priority in the region, and the possibility that they're continuing to breed on Oahu provides new reason for optimism. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,019 |
December 18, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181218074714.htm | Hurricane Maria gave ecologists rare chance to study how tropical dry forests recover | To counteract the damage hurricanes have caused to their canopies, trees appear to adjust key characteristics of their newly grown leaves, according to a year-long field study presented at the British Ecological Society's annual conference today. | When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last year, the worst natural disaster on record to affect the U.S. territory, it stripped numerous trees bare of their leaves and consequently disrupted their ability to absorb the light needed for growth and survival.Ecologists from Clemson University took the opportunity to study how hurricanes affect tropical dry forests in the Caribbean and whether trees were capable of compensating for the significant damage by increasing resource acquisition in newly produced leaves.For the study, the researchers examined the leaves of the 13 most dominant tree species one, eight and twelve months after Hurricane Maria struck and compared them with leaves that were collected before the hurricane. They analysed whether the immediate changes observed in leaves were temporary or maintained over multiple seasons."Our study took us to the Guánica State Forest in southwest Puerto Rico, which comprises one of the best parcels of native dry forest in the Caribbean. Rainfall here is extremely erratic, with huge variability within and between years. The forest also sits on limestone from an ancient coral reef which is extremely porous, meaning trees have little time to capture water as it travels through the underlying rock. As a result, organisms are uniquely adapted to cope with unpredictable water availability," said Tristan Allerton, PhD candidate at Clemson University.Trees rely on exchanging gas through their leaves, simultaneously collecting COThey also looked at the newly produced leaves' shape and structure, which play an important role in efficiently extracting gas from the atmosphere.The preliminary findings suggest that 11 of 13 species studied were taking in CO"A key finding was that the leaves of some of the species contained less chlorophyll than prior to the hurricane. Even though new leaves were better suited structurally to capture valuable resources, lower leaf quality could reduce leaf lifespan and the trees' ability to produce energy," added Professor Skip Van Bloem, Allerton's supervisor at Clemson University.Overall, Caribbean tropical dry forests seem to be capable of tolerating major hurricanes, though the ecologists stressed that there may be "winners" and "losers" in terms of how species respond.Currently it is unclear whether dominant evergreen species can exploit post-hurricane conditions to the same extent as deciduous species.Allerton said: "Many of our evergreens displayed little change in gas exchange rates and in general the relative decline in new leaf chlorophyll after Maria was much greater than for deciduous species. Under normal conditions, evergreens renew their canopies over monthly/yearly timescales, therefore it's likely hurricane canopy damage is a more expensive process for these trees."As climate change leads to expected increases in hurricane frequency and intensity, the species composition of tropical dry forests in the Caribbean is likely to change. One concern would be whether endemic species will disappear over time."This would be a huge shame as Caribbean dry forests are known to have a higher proportion of endemic species than mainland dry forests. Many trees found there are also incredibly ancient, making these forests a living museum of biodiversity," concluded Allerton. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
December 10, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181210115759.htm | Unexpected impact of hurricanes on Puerto Rico's watershed | Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found unprecedentedly high levels of nitrate, an essential plant nutrient, in streams and watersheds of Puerto Rico for a year after two consecutive major hurricanes in 2017. This high amount of nitrate may have important climate change implications that could harm forest recovery and threaten ecosystems along Puerto Rico's coastline by escalating algal blooms and dead zones. | "Nitrate is important for plant growth but this is a case where you can have too much of a good thing," said William McDowell, professor of environmental science at UNH. "The levels of nitrate we were seeing were unusually high. Over the last three decades, we've noticed elevated levels of nitrate right after a hurricane, but after these back-to-back major storms, the wheels came off the bus. We saw an increase in the nitrate levels that still has not fully recovered."Researchers used aquatic sensors in streams in the tropical Luquillo Mountains of Puerto Rico to obtain readings every 15 minutes to follow weekly stream chemistry after both Hurricane Irma (August 2017) and Hurricane Maria (September 2017). They compared this new data to weekly stream chemistry results compiled over the last 35 years -- the longest record of tropical stream chemistry in the world. As expected from past hurricanes, nitrate concentrations increased for a few months after each storm, peaking at around four months. The findings, reported at the 2018 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, D.C., revealed that unlike past hurricanes, the increase was still evident nine months after Hurricane Maria and did not return to previous base levels. The base readings remained higher and each time it rained the nitrate levels spiked, even after small rainstorms, likely reflecting major biotic processes (leaf and tree decomposition and vegetation regrowth) that control nitrate fluxes."After Hurricanes Irma and Maria, there seems to be a "new normal" for the base level of nitrate," said McDowell. "If this continues and the mountain streams transport these higher levels of nitrate to the ocean it could disrupt the coastal ecosystem, possibly endangering coral and other sea life."Also of concern is forest productivity. Based on previous studies and observations at the Luquillo study site, the historical frequency of major hurricane direct hits on the island was estimated to be every 50-60 years. But recent records show that it is now happening once every 10 years. With this increase in frequency and storm strength, much greater export of nitrate to nitrogen-limited coastal waters can be expected than previously estimated, which could deplete the standing stocks of nitrate in the forest and have uncertain effects on forest productivity and regrowth.This research is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and conducted at the NSF Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) and the National Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) site in the Luquillo Mountains. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
December 10, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181210105355.htm | New look at Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria | When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico head-on as a Category 4 storm with winds up to 155 miles per hour in September 2017, it damaged homes, flooded towns, devastated the island's forests and caused the longest electricity black-out in U.S. history. | Two new NASA research efforts delve into Hurricane Maria's far-reaching effects on the island's forests as seen in aerial surveys and on its residents' energy and electricity access as seen in data from space. The findings, presented Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, illustrate the staggering scope of Hurricane Maria's damage to both the natural environment and communities.At night, Earth is lit up in bright strings of roads dotted with pearl-like cities and towns as human-made artificial light takes center stage. During Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico's lights went out.In the days, weeks and months that followed, research physical scientist Miguel Román at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his colleagues developed neighborhood-scale maps of lighting in communities across Puerto Rico. To do this, they combined daily satellite data of Earth at night from the NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite with USGS/NASA Landsat data and OpenStreetMap data. They monitored where and when the electricity grid was restored, and analyzed the demographics and physical attributes of neighborhoods longest affected by the power outages.A disproportionate share of long-duration power failures occurred in rural communities. The study found that 41 percent of Puerto Rico's rural municipalities experienced prolonged periods of outage, compared to 29 percent of urban areas. When combined, power failures across Puerto Rico's rural communities accounted for 61 percent of the estimated cost of 3.9 billion customer-interruption hours, six months after Hurricane Maria. These regions are primarily rural in the mountainous interior of the island where residents were without power for over 120 days. However, even more heavily populated areas had variable recovery rates between neighborhoods, with suburbs often lagging behind urban centers.The difference between urban and rural recovery rates is in part because of the centralized set-up of Puerto Rico's energy grid that directs all power to prioritized locations rather than based on proximity to the nearest power plant, Román said. Areas were prioritized, in part, based on their population densities, which is a disadvantage to rural areas. Within cities, detached houses and low-density suburban areas were also without power longer."It's not just the electricity being lost," Román said. "Storm damage to roads, high-voltage power lines and bridges resulted in cascading failures across multiple sectors, making many areas inaccessible to recovery efforts. So people lost access to other basic services like running water, sanitation, and food for extended time periods."The absence of electricity as seen in the night lights data offers a new way to visualize storm impacts to vulnerable communities across the entirety of Puerto Rico on a daily basis. It's an indicator visible from space that critical infrastructure, beyond power, may be damaged as well, including access to fuel and other necessary supplies. The local communities with long-duration power outages also correspond to areas that reported lack of access to medical resources.The next step for Román when looking at future disasters is to go beyond night lights data and sync it up with updated information on local infrastructure -- roads, bridges, internet connectivity, clean water sources -- so that when the lights are out, disaster responders can cross-reference energy data with other infrastructure bottlenecks that needs to be solved first, which would help identify at-risk communities and allocate resources.Hurricane Maria's lashing rain and winds also transformed Puerto Rico's lush tropical rainforest landscape. Research scientist Doug Morton of Goddard was part of the team of NASA researchers who had surveyed Puerto Rico's forests six months before the storm. The team used Goddard's Lidar, Hyperspectral, and Thermal (G-LiHT) Airborne Imager, a system designed to study the structure and species composition of forests. Shooting 600,000 laser pulses per second, G-LiHT produces a 3D view of the forest structure in high resolution, showing individual trees in high detail from the ground to treetop. In April 2018, post-Maria, the team went back and surveyed the same tracks as in 2017.Comparing the before and after data, the team found that 40 to 60 percent of the tall trees that formed the canopy of the forest were damaged, either snapped in half, uprooted by strong winds or lost large branches."Maria gave the island's forests a haircut," said Morton. "The island lost so many large trees that the overall height of forests was shortened by one-third. We basically saw 60 years' worth of what we would otherwise consider natural treefall disturbances happen in one day."The extensive damage to Puerto Rico's forests had far-reaching effects, Morton said. Fallen trees that no longer stabilize soil on slopes with their roots as well as downed branches can contribute to landslides and debris flows, increased erosion, and poor water quality in streams and rivers where sediments build up.In addition, the lidar surveys across the island corroborate findings presented at AGU by ecologist Maria Uriarte at Columbia University in New York City, who looked at tree death and damage rates in ground plots at the National Science Foundation Luquillo Long-Term Ecological Research site. Uriarte found certain tree species were more susceptible to the high wind damage, while others such as the palms, survived at higher rates, along with shrubs and shorter trees in the understory.Morton and Uriarte will continue to follow the fate of Puerto Rican forests as they recover from hurricane damages using laser technology from the ground to make detailed measurements of forest regrowth. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
November 14, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181114132019.htm | Climate simulations project wetter, windier hurricanes | New supercomputer simulations by climate scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shown that climate change intensified the amount of rainfall in recent hurricanes such as Katrina, Irma, and Maria by 5 to 10 percent. They further found that if those hurricanes were to occur in a future world that is warmer than present, those storms would have even more rainfall and stronger winds. | The study, "Anthropogenic Influences on Major Tropical Cyclone Events," will be published November 15 in the journal "We're already starting to see anthropogenic factors influencing tropical cyclone rainfall," said Patricola, a scientist in Berkeley Lab's Earth and Environmental Sciences Area and lead author of the study. "And our simulations strongly indicate that as time goes on we can expect to see even greater increases in rainfall."Patricola chose 15 tropical cyclones that have occurred over the last decade across the globe -- including the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans -- and ran high-resolution climate simulations of those storms in different scenarios, varying factors such as air and ocean temperatures, humidity, and greenhouse gas concentrations. "It is difficult to unravel how climate change may be influencing tropical cyclones using observations alone because records before the satellite-era are incomplete and natural variability in tropical cyclones is large," she said.She split the study into two parts, one to analyze the effects of climate change so far, and the second to project into the future, to understand how various levels of global warming could change tropical cyclone intensity and rainfall.She found that a warming climate has already made rainfall more intense, by 5 to 10 percent, but has so far not appreciably impacted wind speeds in the hurricanes considered in this study. However if the climate continues to warm, peak wind speeds could increase by as much as 25 knots, or about 29 mph.The researchers used what Wehner, an extreme weather expert in Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, calls the hindcast attribution method, which he describes as the same as a forecast, except that the event has already happened "so you potentially have more information to use."Wehner and Patricola used the same method last year in an analysis of a severe 2013 Colorado storm that caused record flooding. "You can certainly use your expert judgment in a better way after the fact," he said. "So you simulate the event in the world that was, followed by simulating a counterfactual storm in a world that might've been had humans not modified the climate system."For example, by modeling Hurricane Katrina in a pre-industrial climate and again under current conditions, and taking the difference between the results, researchers can determine what can be attributed to anthropogenic warming. However, the design of the study did not allow the researchers to examine the question of whether hurricanes will become more frequent, or whether they will move differently, such as the way Hurricane Harvey stalled for several days over Houston.Wehner also cautions that only one climate model was used (the Weather Research and Forecasting model, developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research), and that confidence will be increased when the results are replicated in other models.In addition to the pre-industrial scenario, Patricola and Wehner also simulated the tropical cyclones occurring in three future climate scenarios, known as RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5, each representing increasing levels of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Since the beginning of the 20th century, average global surface temperatures have risen about 1 degree Celsius; in RCP8.5, the most extreme scenario, temperatures are expected to rise another 3 to 4 degrees.They found that rainfall could increase 15 to 35 percent in the future scenarios. Wind speeds increased by as much as 25 knots, although most hurricanes saw increases of 10 to 15 knots. "The fact that almost all of the 15 tropical cyclones responded in a similar way gives confidence in the results," Patricola said.Another interesting finding was that the structure of storms may change where rainfall is more intense in the eye of the hurricane but less intense on the outer edges. "In a warmer world the inner part of the storm is robbing moisture from the outer part of storm," Wehner said.Current state-of-the-art long-term climate simulations are approaching resolutions of 25 kilometers and finer, which can broadly represent tropical cyclones. However, important finer-scale features such as cloud clusters can only be approximated at that scale, with unknown implications for climate projections. This motivated the Berkeley Lab team to run their simulations at a resolution of 4.5 kilometers, which allowed some representation of cloud clusters. They found that the finer spatial scale did not alter the qualitative aspects of their conclusions."We found that the climate change influences on the wind and rainfall of Hurricane Katrina are insensitive to model resolution between 3 km and 25 km," Patricola said. "This is good news because it suggests we can place more confidence in projections from global climate models at resolutions of at least 25 km, which are becoming more common."With 15 hurricanes simulated in five climate scenarios, each one repeated 10 times, the study used millions of computing hours on the Cori supercomputer at Berkeley Lab's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. "NERSC was absolutely crucial in being able to get this research done," Patricola said. "Some studies have looked at how individual storms may have changed due to climate change. One of the important things about this study is that we were able to use the same climate model and methodology for 15 storms, which allows us to assess how robust the results are, and had never been done before."Patricola emphasizes the importance of using both observations and climate models to understand the climate system. Several studies, including one from Berkeley Lab published last year in | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
November 14, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181114131957.htm | Houston's urban sprawl increased rainfall, flooding during Hurricane Harvey | Houston's urban landscape directly contributed to the torrential rainfall and deadly flooding experienced during Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, according to Princeton and University of Iowa researchers. The researchers report in the journal | Using computer models and weather data, the researchers recreated Hurricane Harvey and compared the total rainfall with urban buildup to total rainfall without urban buildup. The results indicate that human-made development helped create a wetter hurricane -- one that dropped 40 to 60 inches of rain over four days -- as well as more serious flooding, with higher flood peaks and greater overall damage.The results highlight the human role in extreme weather events, as well as the need to consider urban and suburban development when calculating hurricane risk and preparing for hurricane damage and recovery, the authors said. The study also accentuates the need to understand the compounded human impact on rainfall and flooding caused by urbanization and climate change."Our focus on the role of urbanization was aimed at providing a fuller perspective of human activities on Harvey's rainfall and flooding," said co-author Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton professor of geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI). "Humans have influenced both climate, through greenhouse gas emissions, and the local environment around Houston through urbanization in ways that we thought could have affected rainfall and flooding from Harvey."The researchers found that as Houston's urban center grew upward and outward, flood risk changed, including a greater risk of higher flood peaks and more serious and dangerous flooding overall. As the city's miles of impervious sidewalks and streets increased, heavy rainfall could not be absorbed into the ground."Given that hurricane winds and rainfall are projected to intensify in the future, and that urbanization along our coasts is also expected to continue to increase, our work highlights the need to understand the risks and to implement appropriate flood-mitigation strategies," said lead author Wei Zhang, an assistant research scientist at Iowa's IIHR -- Hydroscience and Engineering research center.Much of the scientific analysis that followed the 2017 hurricane season focused on the role of climate -- including the overall warming of the planet -- in determining a hurricane's physical strength and total amount of rainfall. The Princeton and Iowa researchers decided to take a different, but complementary, tack and looked at urbanization's possible role."Hurricane Havey's impacts on Houston highlight hazards to coastal cities along the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard of the United States," said co-author James Smith, a Princeton professor of civil and environmental engineering and PEI associated faculty. "An unfortunate repeat performance from Hurricane Florence this year underscores the problems of extreme tropical cyclone rainfall in urban settings."The researchers experimented with different computer models to simulate Hurricane Harvey's rainfall in Houston, first looking at total rainfall with the city's current urban profile, then at rainfall for the same geographic area but with open fields and crops in place of streets and skyscrapers. They found that the non-urban areas received significantly less rainfall, and that rainfall patterns were significantly different than in the urban areas.The reason was that "surface roughness" due to the presence of human-made structures create a "drag effect" on hurricanes. This effect occurs when high winds strike tall buildings, creating friction. In the case of Hurricane Harvey, winds shifted warm surface air farther up into the atmosphere, thereby creating an optimal situation for cloud formation and precipitation."When Hurricane Harvey blew into Houston, it literally got snagged on the city's tall skyscrapers and towers," said Gabriele Villarini, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of IIHR. "The friction caused by high winds buffeting tall buildings created a drag effect that influenced air and heat movement and resulted in optimal conditions for precipitation."Using statistical models, the researchers also looked at year-over-year changes in flood peaks and compared them to rainfall amounts and population growth, a proxy for urbanization. They compared these results to flood peaks from the 1950s, a period that predates urban development in Houston, and again found a positive correlation between urban growth and increased flood risk."Urbanization is generally associated with a significant reduction in storm-water infiltration," Villarini said. "Houston has experienced one of the most impressive urban-development booms in U.S. history, and with growth comes an increase in impervious surfaces. This increase in urbanization, combined with the region's flat clay terrain, represents a very problematic mix, even with flood-mitigation measures in place."The researchers caution that failure to account for urban factors in terms of hurricane preparation could present serious and costly problems for coastal cities."While this research can't be extrapolated to every coastal urban area in the nation, it does highlight the unexpected costs of development," Villarini said. "For every new roadway poured and for every new high-rise erected, there is an increased risk for more adverse rainfall and flooding, and that's certainly something that city officials and residents should consider when they contemplate future growth." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
November 6, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181106192736.htm | Undeterred, Gulf fish spawn despite hurricane | Even a Category 4 hurricane doesn't kill the mood for coastal fish -- and that's good news for all species, as well as for a multibillion-dollar recreational fishing industry. As extreme weather patterns threaten to bring more and larger storms to the Gulf Coast, new findings from the University of Texas at Austin's Marine Science Institute show some important fish species are able to continue spawning even in a severe storm. | "This data gives us a little insight into how key species will handle changing and unpredictable conditions," said Christopher Biggs, a Ph.D. candidate studying fisheries ecology and lead author on a paper published this week in Biggs and a team of scientists from the University of Texas Marine Science Institute (UTMSI) and the University of Florida discovered that spotted seatrout kept spawning in late August 2017, even as the eye of Hurricane Harvey passed overhead, bringing with it windspeeds of up to 134 miles per hour and a storm surge of 8-10 feet."These fish are resilient and productive, even in the face of such a huge storm," Biggs said. "On land, it was complete destruction, but these fish didn't seem disturbed."Understanding the trout's reproductive patterns and habitat needs is critical for the Texas coast, where sport fishing generates about $2 billion annually for the local economy, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. The murky waters of the Gulf of Mexico can make tracking the seatrout difficult, so the scientists study spawning patterns and behavior by placing underwater microphones in known spawning locations and leaving them there to record what follows.Seatrout are actually not trout but a type of drum fish, and males make a distinct pulsing noise when spawning. The sound allows researchers to map and observe changes at spawning sites -- information that state and federal agencies can use to help maintain healthy, sustainable fisheries.In reviewing recordings captured in 2017, the scientists were surprised to find that the fish were spawning every day during the spawning season. And when Hurricane Harvey hit, they were more surprised that the storm did not disrupt the spawning. The only difference was that immediately after the storm, the fish began spawning 2.5 hours early. Over the course of the five days after the storm, the spawning patterns returned to normal.The time difference was possibly due to water temperature differences brought on by the storm, Biggs noted, as the temperature returned to normal at about the same rate as the spawning patterns."Seatrout are an important part of the ecosystem," Biggs said. "They are one of the most popular recreational fish. They are a top predator in the estuary and a favorite food for dolphins."The data coming out of the hurricane is a bright spot for the Marine Science Institute, which had several other projects severely disrupted by Harvey. Most of the buildings on the campus were damaged, equipment worth millions of dollars was damaged or destroyed, and many experiments were lost or set back as a result of the storm.Repairs continue on the MSI campus. The Estuarine Research Center, one of three main laboratory buildings, reopened for scientists and students in September. The campus is expected to reopen to the public in spring 2019. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
November 2, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181102180805.htm | Culture strongly influences coping behaviors after natural disasters | Demographic and cultural differences strongly influence the coping styles young people use when they're affected by a natural disaster, and these disparities should be taken into account when providing services to help them recover from these traumatic experiences, a new study found. | University of Illinois social work professors Tara M. Powell and Kate M. Wegmann led the study, which utilized a new method of assessing coping among disaster-affected youths to address the limitations of a commonly used survey called Kidcope."We know that the way a kid copes after a disaster determines how well they're going to overcome the experience or whether they develop problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or anxiety," Powell said. "However, one of the things that we don't know is the best measure that researchers and clinicians can use to assess young people's post-disaster coping methods."The current study explored the coping strategies used by middle-class teen girls in St. Tammany Parish, an affluent area of New Orleans, after the area was damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Of the 650 girls in the study, about 82 percent reported that the hurricane forced their families to evacuate their homes.Six months after Katrina, the girls completed an adapted version of the Kidcope assessment, a survey widely used by clinicians and researchers to examine children's and adolescents' use of behaviors such as distraction, social withdrawal and social support to handle major stressors, including natural disasters.However, one limitation of Kidcope is that it was designed for use in clinical settings to examine young people's coping with serious illnesses and lengthy hospitalizations -- contexts that differ from natural disasters, the researchers wrote.When used in prior studies to assess coping among hurricane-affected youths, Kidcope's structural modeling was variable and unstable, according to Powell and Wegmann. To address these inconsistencies, they and co-author Stacy Overstreet of Tulane University tested three different structural models to find the best fit with their study population of young hurricane survivors.They found that the coping strategies utilized by the girls in St. Tammany Parish resembled a four-factor structural model, which included positive coping behaviors along with less healthy externalizing behaviors such as blame and anger, wishful thinking and social withdrawal.In comparing these girls' coping behaviors with those used by a sample of low-income, predominantly African-American peers who also survived Hurricane Katrina, the researchers found few similarities.Instead, the St. Tammany Parish girls' coping methods were consistent with those used by middle-class youths who were affected by a different natural disaster -- Hurricane Andrew, which struck the Bahamas, Florida and Louisiana in 1992, Wegmann said."We found that culture really matters in terms of how adolescents respond to a disaster," Wegmann said. "Some of the cultural values that are associated with resilience, such as a focus on community and informal means of support, are less prominent among middle-class populations than lower income populations."Middle class and wealthier demographics' cultural values are more about individualism and personal responsibility, so the communalism that can help a person recover from a disaster just isn't there," Wegmann said.By utilizing a data analysis technique called "exploratory structural equation modeling," the researchers found that the behavioral strategies the St. Tammany Parish girls used also had complex relationships with each other.For example, the coping strategy of attempting to forget about the problem, which was associated primarily with social withdrawal, also was associated with wishful thinking, blame and anger, and positive coping.Understanding how and why disaster victims utilize varying coping methods and the influences that demographic differences may have on their responses is hampered by the lack of consistent, reliable assessment tools, according to the authors.Developing effective, well-validated measures that can be distributed easily and adapted for differing populations should become a research priority to better assist disaster survivors with recovery, Powell and Wegmann said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
October 23, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181023150032.htm | Strong Indian monsoons steer Atlantic hurricanes towards land, study finds | Strong monsoons in the Indian Ocean can induce easterly winds that push Atlantic Ocean hurricanes westward, increasing the likelihood they'll make landfall in the Americas, according to new research. | A new study finds that in years where summer rainstorms in India are stronger, Atlantic hurricanes move further westward towards land. In years where the rains aren't as strong, hurricanes tend to curve northward earlier and fizzle out in the north Atlantic Ocean.This newly-discovered relationship could help scientists better predict the path of oncoming hurricanes, especially in late summer months like September, when Atlantic hurricane activity peaks, according to the study's authors."What amazes me is how rainfall near India can drive important changes to Atlantic hurricanes half a world away," said Patrick Kelly, an atmospheric researcher at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington and lead author of the new study in The Indian monsoon season has typically waned by September, but climate projections suggest that under future warming conditions, monsoon precipitation will increase, and the monsoon season could end later in the year. As the climate continues to warm, the monsoon could have an increasing influence on the paths of Atlantic hurricanes, according to the new study."Forecasting for landfall of hurricanes on seasonal timescales is something we just haven't typically done," said Benjamin Kirtman, a professor of meteorology at the University of Miami who was not involved in the new research. "The thing that is profoundly exciting about this work is its potential to improve seasonal forecasting and predict landfalling hurricanes."Previous research has attributed changes in hurricane steering to El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a periodic fluctuation in sea surface temperature and air pressure in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Scientists have traditionally relied on the La Niña cool phase of ENSO to make predictions about how strong a particular Atlantic hurricane season will be, but have trouble forecasting the paths of individual hurricanes."In seasonal forecasting of hurricanes, our biggest predictor of what's going to happen has typically been La Niña," Kirtman said. "Unfortunately, seasonal forecasting based on La Niña hasn't been able to tell us much about landfall."In the new study, Kelly and his colleagues wanted to find out how the Indian monsoon, a known source of climate variability, affected hurricane tracks, since the Indian monsoon had not yet been investigated in the context of Atlantic hurricanes. They conducted simulations of hurricane tracks with a model that incorporates observed variations of monsoon intensity and found that in response to strong monsoons, hurricanes shifted significantly westward.Strong monsoons influence hurricane steering by enhancing the effects of the North Atlantic subtropical high, a center of high atmospheric pressure in the Atlantic Ocean. When the subtropical high increases, stronger winds come from the east and push hurricanes westward.According to Kelly, La Niña and the Indian monsoon are correlated, but the strength of the monsoon influences the steering of hurricanes independently of La Niña fluctuations, which are responsible for changes in hurricane frequency. In other words, La Niña fluctuations may result in more Atlantic hurricanes, but strong Indian monsoons steer them further westward, making it more likely they will make landfall in the Americas.It's important to account for the correlation when studying hurricane steering and landfall probability."This work untangles La Niña's role on frequency, whether there are more or less hurricanes, from the steering impacts of winds, governed by the Indian monsoon," Kelly said. "La Niña events often happen during a strong monsoon, and they are correlated, but this work helps separate the independent influence of those two phenomena." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
October 10, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181010182221.htm | All eyes on Hurricane Michael | Hurricane Michael plowed into the Florida panhandle Wednesday, Oct. 10, as a major Category 4 storm -- the strongest hurricane ever to hit that region. Many NASA instruments are keeping tabs on Michael from space, including the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR). | The first image, taken by AIRS, shows Hurricane Michael just off the west coast of Florida on Oct. 10 in the early morning hours local time. The large purple area indicates very cold clouds at about -90°F (-68°C) carried high into the atmosphere by deep thunderstorms. These storm clouds are associated with heavy rainfall. The eye, which is much warmer than the surrounding clouds, appears in green. The red areas moving away from the storm indicate temperatures of around 60°F (15°C), typical of the surface of Earth at night. These red areas are mostly cloud-free.MISR carries nine cameras fixed at different angles, each of which viewed Michael over the course of approximately seven minutes when it was just off Florida's west coast on Tuesday, Oct. 9.Images from the nine views are used to calculate the height of the cloud tops, and the motion of the clouds between the views provides information on wind speed and direction. This first MISR image shows the view from the central, downward-pointing camera (left), the calculated cloud-top heights (middle) and wind velocity arrows (right) superimposed on top. The length of the arrows is proportional to wind speed, and the colors show the altitude of the cloud tops in kilometers.MISR's stereo anaglyph shows a three-dimensional view of Michael that combines two of MISR's camera angles. Using 3D red-blue glasses, you can see a number of bright "clumps." These clumps, called "vortical hot spots," are groups of strong thunderstorms embedded in the larger circulation of the hurricane. They indicate the rapid transport of heat energy from the ocean surface into the storm and usually occur when a hurricane intensifies quickly.The National Hurricane Center clocked Michael's sustained wind speed at 150 mph (240 kph) just before noon local time on Wednesday, Oct. 10. It is expected to bring strong winds, storm surges and heavy rainfall to much of the southeast.AIRS, in conjunction with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU), senses emitted infrared and microwave radiation from Earth to provide a three-dimensional look at Earth's weather and climate. Working in tandem, the two instruments make simultaneous observations down to Earth's surface, even in the presence of heavy clouds. With more than 2,000 channels sensing different regions of the atmosphere, the system creates a global, three-dimensional map of atmospheric temperature and humidity, cloud amounts and heights, greenhouse gas concentrations, and many other atmospheric phenomena. Launched into Earth orbit in 2002, the AIRS and AMSU instruments fly onboard NASA's Aqua spacecraft and are managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech, in Pasadena, California.MISR was built and is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The instrument flies aboard the Terra satellite, which is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The MISR data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center in Hampton, Virginia.More information about AIRS is available here: More information on MISR is available here: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
October 1, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181001171149.htm | Experiencing extreme weather is not enough to convince climate change skeptics | Experiencing extreme weather is not enough to convince climate change sceptics than humans are damaging the environment, a new study shows. | Political bias and partisan news reporting influence whether people report experiencing certain extreme weather events, the research suggests.But Americans who lived in areas where a variety of extreme events were recorded -- flood, tornado, hurricane, and drought -- were ultimately no more likely to share the same beliefs about climate change as scientists.Dr Ben Lyons, from the University of Exeter, who led the research, said: ""Extreme weather plays a limited long-term role in forming people's beliefs about climate change. Instead, their views and beliefs can alter the way they perceive the weather. We have found when an extreme weather event is ambiguous, as with polar vortex and drought, people are more likely to see the event through a partisan lens. If there is grey area, people are more comfortable applying their preferred label."The University of Exeter, University of Michigan and University of Texas research found that Republicans were less likely to report experiencing a polar vortex, while those exposed to liberal media were more likely.However the weather can be sometimes so extreme that it overshadows personal views -- the researchers found that partisanship and media use did not affect the way people in the American Northeast -- where the 2014 and 2015 polar vortex events hit hardest -- reported the weather they had experienced.Those who favoured liberal news sources such as the Huffington Post or the Daily Show reported experiencing drought more often than national weather data would suggest they actually did.Dr Lyons said: "Very extreme weather accompanied by constant media coverage is harder for people to deny. But on the other end of the scale, droughts can take longer to have an effect, so people have some difficulty perceiving their onset and this may allow them to bring their biases to the table."Academics surveyed 3,057 people in the USA to ask them about the extreme weather they had experienced over a five-year period, and also if they believed in climate change, human causation, and the scientific consensus on the matter. They also asked where they lived. The experts were then able to compare these answers to official weather reports for that region for the same time period.Data about the weather was taken from the Storm Events Database compiled by NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS). The data included droughts, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes. A total of 21.7 per cent of respondents reported experiencing a polar vortex, 41.0 per cent a drought, 19.8 per cent a tornado, 29.3 per cent flood, and 16.7 per cent a hurricane in the past five years. However the data shows 21.3 per cent lived in a county where a flood was recorded over the time period, 25.3 per cent a tornado, 4.3 per cent a hurricane, and 4.4 per cent drought.A total of 59.2 per cent of respondents agreed that "there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades." Of respondents who agreed with this statement, 74.2 per cent agreed that the Earth was warming mostly due to "human activity such as burning fossil fuels."Dr Lyons said: "This research shows people's perception of extreme weather can be processed through partisan lenses. This means efforts to connect extreme events with climate change may do more to rally those with liberal beliefs than convince those with more conservative views that humans are having an impact on the climate. "However, it's important to note that we take a big-picture look rather than focus on specific events. Particularly intense events -- a 100-year flood or catastrophic hurricane -- might be most capable of influencing attitudes." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
October 1, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181001154041.htm | New weather model could increase tornado-warning times | Penn State researchers are the first to use data obtained from recent next-generation satellites in a numerical weather-prediction model used to provide guidance for tornadic thunderstorm forecasting. | GOES-16, which was launched in 2016, recently became fully operational but methods for incorporating the data, until now, did not exist.Researchers used a method for all-sky infrared radiance developed through Penn State's Center for Advanced Data Assimilation and Predictability Techniques (ADAPT), to incorporate data into models for weather events in the Midwest. The experiments were hindcast, meaning the models were run after the weather event and compared with actual events. The model was able to forecast supercell thunderstorms with atmospheric conditions that are very conducive to tornadoes.The results, reported in "It's not just the data that's important," Fuqing Zhang, professor of meteorology and director of ADAPT said. "It's how we design very sophisticated numerical mathematical algorithms to ingest that satellite data into the model. This is really our expertise and our pride. Our team is the first to be able to effectively take in this high resolution satellite data and prove it can be useful in real-case scenarios."Forecasting tornadic thunderstorms is important because these events are especially quick to form, hard to predict and can cause catastrophic damage. Thunderstorms account for 40 percent of all severe weather events in the United States, causing 14 percent of damage and 17 percent of related deaths, according to the National Climate Data Center."For many storms in the United States, we have good radar data, however, it's very hard using any of the existing technologies to capture the environmental and storm conditions before the storm totally develops," Zhang said. "We're able to extend the warning time for these events because the satellite can look at the field even before the clouds form and our models can ingest that information to improve and advance forecasts."In the past 40 years, tornado warning lead-time -- meaning the time interval between when a warning is issued and the tornado occurs -- has increased on average from 3 to 14 minutes. Zhang said this method could extend that lead time even further."Researchers have made huge improvements in tornado lead times but, for many people, 14 minutes isn't enough," said David Stensrud, head of the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Penn State. "If you have a big sports stadium or a hospital it takes more than 14 minutes to prepare for the weather threat. There is certainly a need for more advanced warnings. Our research indicates that by combining data assimilation and high-resolution models we can get lead times beyond 30 minutes. Doubling the lead time would have huge potential societal impacts."Better models and better data supplied by GOES-16 could also reduce false alarm rates, he said.Researchers are working with NOAA and the National Weather Service to ready the algorithms for ingesting these satellite data for widespread use.Satellite data has proven tricky for use in weather models because satellites do not capture key variables such as wind speed, pressure, temperature and water vapor. But satellites capture data known as brightness temperature, which show how much radiation is emitted by objects on Earth and in the atmosphere at different infrared frequencies. Using all-sky radiance, researchers can use brightness temperature captured at different frequencies to paint a picture of cloud formations and water vapor fields.In research that's still under review and profiled in Nature, Zhang and his colleagues show this method forecasted that Hurricane Harvey would reach a category 4 while existing models forecast it as a category 1. Harvey became the first category 4 hurricane to make landfall along the Texas coast since 1961.GOES-16 covers one-sixth of the Earth, including the Eastern portion of the United States and all of the Atlantic Ocean, and is geostationary. It replaces GOES-13, offering data resolution at a scale slightly larger than half a mile, much better than its predecessor at 2.5 miles, and with data available every 5 minutes or less.The increased spatial and temporal resolution is important because it offers much more information about what is taking place within thunderstorms, hurricanes and other severe weather events. The satellite uses 16 bands of image data using visible and infrared light to reveal factors such as fog, winds, vegetation, snow and ice, fires, water vapor and lightning. It is one of three similar satellites in operation that collectively cover nearly all habitable land and surrounding oceans.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates GOES with contributions from NASA. Postdoctoral scholar Yunji Zhang contributed to this research that was funded by NASA. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
September 20, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180920101110.htm | Climate change modifies the composition of reefs | The gorgonians are replacing scleractinian corals that are disappearing from marine ecosystems due to human impact and global climate change. This is the result of a study carried out by researcher of the Institute of Science and Environmental Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Sergio Rossi, which analyzes the reason why the gorgonians (or octocorals) are proving to be one of the "winning" species in this transition process triggered by the spiraling death rates and degradation of corals in the deep sea and reefs. | It is estimated that after the last El Niño event (2015-2016), 50% of Australia's coral reefs are no longer functional: corals have died or been severely damaged. Climate change is eroding at all levels the most complex systems, such as reefs created by scleractinian corals, which are efficient animals that capture light through their symbionts (microscopic algae) to nourish themselves and build "stone." That same "stone" (the hard part of the coral, formed by calcium carbonate) is partly responsible for the high rate of algae photosynthesis, which supply up to 95% of the nutrients the animal needs to live."What is going on? Although the light may remain fairly constant, the sea temperature has risen," explains Rossi. The higher the temperatures, the more acceleration of the metabolic processes related to the photosynthetic process, to the extent that toxic molecules are created. The excess toxicity caused by the algae bothers the coral ... or the algae itself, it is not clear. What is clear is that when the temperature is too high, the algae simply leave the coral. This process is known as bleaching. And without algae, with only 5-15% of nutrients, the coral dies.Given this situation, the gorgonians (and sponges) are replacing the dead coral to a great extent. The study, which was recently published in the journal However, according to the researcher, the replacement of corals by gorgonians is not entirely satisfactory. Although the gorgonians are more flexible to changes and adapt better, they store and retain less amount of carbon from the atmosphere, and their structures do not form reefs such as hard corals, nor are they more resistant to hurricanes. According to Rossi, "99% of the energy of the waves reaching the coastline during a hurricane is absorbed by coral reefs." Therefore, the study concludes that the disappearance of these reefs and other complex and long-lived biogenic structures only accelerates the degradation process of the entire planet. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
September 13, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180913113957.htm | NASA gets inside look at large and powerful Hurricane Florence | NASA's Aqua satellite provided an infrared look at the large and powerful Hurricane Florence early on Sept. 13 that indicated wind shear was temporarily affecting the southern side of the storm. | The National Hurricane Center or NHC noted that hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 80 miles (130 km) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 195 miles (315 km).Early on Sept. 13, NASA's Aqua satellite's infrared data showed the clouds in the southern quadrant of Hurricane Florence appeared warmer than storms throughout the rest of Florence. That means that the cloud tops are lower in the atmosphere, and the storms are not as powerful. That's because vertical wind shear, the change of speed and direction of winds with altitude was buffeting the southern side of Florence and preventing the development of higher, stronger thunderstorms in that part of the storm.NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC) said "microwave overpass indicated that the convection over the southern and southeastern portions of the storm is still disrupted, and that the eyewall was open to the southeast. It appears that some southern shear has caused the degradation of the inner core. The global models suggest that this shear will relax today while Florence moves over warm waters, however, given the current storm structure, little overall change in strength is anticipated as Florence approaches the coast."At 2:20 a.m. EDT (0230 UTC) on Sept. 13, Moderate Resolution Imagine Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed Hurricane Florence in infrared light. MODIS found coldest cloud top temperatures in a tight band around the eye wall (the thunderstorms surrounding the open eye), as cold as or colder than minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (F)/minus 112 degrees Celsius (C). Surrounding the eye were thick rings of powerful storms with cloud tops as cold as or colder than minus 70F (minus 56.6C).NASA research has found that cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder than the 70F/56.6C threshold have the capability to generate heavy rainfall.NHC noted s Storm Surge Warning is in effect for South Santee River, South Carolina to Duck, North Carolina and for the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds, including the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers. A Storm Surge Watch is in effect for Edisto Beach South Carolina to South Santee River, South Carolina and north of Duck, North Carolina to the North Carolina/Virginia border. A Hurricane Warning is in effect for South Santee River, South Carolina to Duck, North Carolina and the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. A Hurricane Watch is in effect for Edisto Beach, South Carolina to South Santee River, South Carolina. A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect from north of Duck, North Carolina to Cape Charles Light Virginia, and Chesapeake Bay south of New Point Comfort.At 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC), the center of the eye of Hurricane Florence was located by an Air Force Reserve reconnaissance aircraft and NOAA Doppler weather radars to be near latitude 33.1 degrees north and longitude 75.1 degrees west.Florence is moving slower toward the northwest at about 12 mph (20 kph). This general motion, accompanied by a further decrease in forward speed, is expected to continue through today. A turn to the west-northwest and west at an even slower forward speed is expected tonight and Friday, and a slow west-southwestward motion is forecast Friday night and SaturdayMaximum sustained winds are near 110 mph (175 kph) with higher gusts. Little change in strength is expected before the center reaches the coast, with weakening expected after the center moves inland.On the forecast track, the center of Florence will approach the coasts of North and South Carolina later today, then move near or over the coast of southern North Carolina and eastern South Carolina in the hurricane warning area tonight and Friday. A slow motion over eastern South Carolina is forecast Friday night through Saturday night.For updated forecasts on Florence, visit: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
August 28, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180828121419.htm | Recommendations aimed at preparing Puerto Rico for hurricane season | In an independent report published today, researchers at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health (GW Milken Institute SPH) estimated there were 2,975 excess deaths in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria from September 2017 through the end of February 2018. The researchers also identified gaps in the death certification and public communication processes and went on to make recommendations that will help prepare Puerto Rico for future hurricanes and other natural disasters. | Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017 and, soon after, the government of Puerto Rico determined that 64 people had died. Later, unofficial investigations and independent scientific studies suggested that the death toll was likely much higher. To get a more accurate and rigorous assessment, the Governor of Puerto Rico commissioned an independent study from GW Milken Institute SPH.Today, GW Milken Institute SPH, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Puerto Rico Graduate School of Public Health, delivered on that request."The results of our epidemiological study suggest that, tragically, Hurricane Maria led to a large number of excess deaths throughout the island. Certain groups -- those in lower income areas and the elderly -- faced the highest risk," said Carlos Santos-Burgoa, MD, MPH, PhD, the principal investigator of the project and a professor of global health at GW Milken Institute SPH. "We hope this report and its recommendations will help build the island's resilience and pave the way toward a plan that will protect all sectors of society in times of natural disasters."The epidemiological study found:The research represents the most rigorous study of excess mortality due to the hurricane done to date. The GW-led team analyzed death certificates and other mortality data for six months from September 2017 through February 2018. Using a sophisticated mathematical model, the team compared the total number of deaths during that time to the expected number based on historical patterns. The researchers also adjusted for age, sex and migration from the island.In addition to estimating the excess deaths, the team also sought to identify flaws in mortality surveillance and communications systems and to offer recommendations aimed at helping Puerto Rico -- and the mainland U.S. -- establish better methods for disaster preparedness and response.The team found that lack of communication, well established guidelines and lack of training for physicians on how to certify deaths in disasters, resulted in a limited number of deaths being identified as hurricane related. Thus, like other jurisdictions that are part of the U.S., the death certification process can lead to an undercount of deaths related to disasters like Hurricane Maria. The team found error rates in death certificates that were within the norms. In fact, similar error rates in death certificates are found throughout the United States. To reduce such errors, the team recommends that physicians and other relevant health care providers in Puerto Rico -- and on the mainland -- receive explicit training so that they can more accurately certify deaths under disaster conditions.The team also found that poor communication about deaths after the disaster, and especially the distinction between deaths directly related to the storm and those indirectly tied to it, contributed to confusion and consternation among members of the public.The report provides a number of key recommendations:"The lessons learned from this report and subsequent studies will help not just Puerto Rico, but other regions in the U.S. and around the world that face the ongoing threat of hurricanes and other natural disasters," said Lynn R. Goldman, MD, MS, MPH, Michael and Lori Milken Dean of the GW Milken Institute SPH and a co-author of the report. "If enacted, the recommendations of this report could help save lives in Puerto Rico and beyond."The report is entitled, "Ascertainment of the Estimated Excess Mortality from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
August 23, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180823092033.htm | Bird feared extinct rediscovered in the Bahamas | One of the rarest birds in the western hemisphere, the Bahama Nuthatch, has been rediscovered by research teams searching the island of Grand Bahama. | The finding is particularly significant because the species had been feared extinct following the catastrophic damage caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and had not been found in subsequent searches.But it is feared that there could only be two left -- placing the species on the verge of extinction and certainly among the world's most critically endangered birds.The Bahama Nuthatch is an endangered species, only known from a small area of native pine forest on Grand Bahama Island, which lies approximately 100 miles off Palm Beach, Florida.University of East Anglia masters students Matthew Gardner and David Pereira set out on a three-month expedition to find this and other endemic Caribbean pine forest bird species.They made their way through dense forest with thick 'poisonwood' understorey -- the layer of vegetation growing beneath the main forest canopy -- in what is thought to be one of the most exhaustive searches of the island.They worked in partnership with Nigel Collar and David Wege from Birdlife International and the Bahamas National Trust, the organisation which works to protect the habitats and species of The Bahama Islands.Meanwhile a second team of Bahamian students, led by Zeko McKenzie of the University of The Bahamas-North and supported by the American Bird Conservancy, also searched for the bird.The Bahama Nuthatch has a long bill, a distinctive high-pitched squeaky call, and nests only in mature pine trees. There had been a sharp decline in its population crashing from an estimated 1,800 in 2004 to just 23 being seen in a survey in 2007. The decline likely began in the 1950s due to habitat loss due to timber removal, and more recently due to hurricane damage, storm surges having killed large areas native forest.Both teams made Nuthatch sightings in May, and the UEA team were lucky enough to capture the elusive bird on film.Dr Diana Bell, from UEA's School of Biological Sciences, said: "The Bahama Nuthatch is a critically endangered species, threatened by habitat destruction and degradation, invasive species, tourist developments, fires and hurricane damage."Our researchers looked for the bird across 464 survey points in 34,000 hectares of pine forest. It must have been like looking for a needle in a hay stack. They played out a recording of the bird's distinctive call in order to attract it."As well as searching for the elusive bird, they also collected environmental data to better understand its habitat preferences and surveyed the extent of hurricane and fire damage," she added."Matthew Gardner said: "We were the first to undertake such an exhaustive search through 700km of forest on foot."We had been scouring the forest for about six weeks, and had almost lost hope. At that point we'd walked about 400km. Then, I suddenly heard its distinctive call and saw the unmistakable shape of a Nuthatch descending towards me. I shouted with joy, I was ecstatic!"The UEA team made six Nuthatch sightings in total, and McKenzie's team independently made five sightings, using different methods, in the same small area of forest -- including a sighting of what they believe to be two birds together.Mr Gardner said: "During three months of intensive searching we made six Bahama Nuthatch sightings. Our search was extremely thorough but we never saw two birds together, so we had thought there might only be one left in existence.""The other team have reported seeing two together so that is promising. However, these findings place the species on the verge of extinction and certainly amongst the world's most critically endangered birds.""We also don't know the sex of the birds. In many cases when birds dwindle to such small numbers, any remaining birds are usually male.""The photographs clearly show this distinctive species and cannot be anything else" said Michael Parr, President of American Bird Conservancy and a UEA alumnus."Fortunately this is not a hard bird to identify, but it was certainly a hard bird to find," he added.The Nuthatch was spotted in a small area known as Lucaya Estates. During the research project, birds were seen and heard in three distinct but nearby locations within this area.Researcher Zeko McKenzie said: "Although the Bahama Nuthatch has declined precipitously, we are encouraged by the engagement of conservation scientists who are now looking for ways to save and recover the species."The UEA team however are less optimistic as the exact drivers of the precipitous decline of the bird are still unclear.Dr Diana Bell said: "Sadly, we think that the chances of bringing this bird back from the brink of extinction are very slim -- due to the very low numbers left, and because we are not sure of the precise drivers for its decline."But it is still absolutely crucial that conservation efforts in the native Caribbean pine forest do not lapse as it is such an important habitat for other endemic birds including the Bahama Swallow, Bahama Warbler and Bahama Yellowthroat."The habitat is also incredibly important for North American migrants including the Kirtlands Warbler," she added.Ellsworth Weir, Grand Bahama Parks Manager at the Bahamas National Trust, said: "It has been a pleasure for The Bahamas National Trust to host both Matthew and David as they conducted this very important research on Grand Bahama.""Their work has taken them across the length and breadth of the island in what was likely the most in depth search to be conducted. Their research, which was inclusive of bird and habitat surveys, has helped to answer questions that some residents have been asking for some time.""Sadly, we realize now that we are faced with a very dire situation regarding the Bahama Nuthatch. We wouldn't have realized the extent of the issue without the persistent efforts of David and Matthew."A short video is available here: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
August 22, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180822150823.htm | What is the maximum possible number of Atlantic tropical cyclones? See the year 2005 | In a multi-national collaborative study published August 22, 2018 in | They found the record number of tropical cyclones that occurred in 2005 (28 storms) is close to the maximum number that might occur in this region given existing climate conditions. This information is useful for risk management because the year 2005 has already been extensively studied and its tropical cyclone hazards and risks to infrastructure are well known. Thus, it could serve as a tropical cyclone risk benchmark for future hurricane seasons in this basin.The year 2005 was certainly the biggest year for tropical storm and hurricane numbers in the Atlantic since the 1940s and, by some measures, the biggest for at least 150 years. There were so many tropical storms in 2005 that the U.S. National Hurricane Center ran out of tropical cyclone names; by late in the hurricane season, they resorted to calling tropical storms by letters of the Greek alphabet. It is of considerable interest whether a year like 2005 might occur again, and how often, not only for hurricane forecasters but for emergency and risk managers throughout the North Atlantic region.In this study, thousands of years of climate model simulations were examined to see if they could produce climate conditions more favourable for tropical cyclone formation in this region than occurred in 2005. The statistical relationship between climate conditions during the tropical cyclone season and tropical cyclone formation has been previously calculated using a variety of indices, which were examined in this study. The year-to-year simulated variations of these indices in the climate models were compared to total observed tropical cyclone numbers in 2005, but the models only exceeded the observed 2005 numbers rarely, about 1% of the time, and maximum index values simulated in the models were still comparable to 2005 numbers.Lead author, Dr. Sally Lavender of CSIRO said "It's hard for the Atlantic climate to generate a lot more tropical cyclones in this region than occurred in 2005. Even when we looked at thousands of years of climate model simulations, they didn't really indicate a convincing possibility of many more tropical storms."While the study does provide an estimate of the maximum number of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, there are important remaining issues. "The indices do show generally good relationships between climate and tropical cyclone formation rates, but they are not perfect," added Dr. Louis-Philippe Caron (BSC), "and the climate model simulations of the Atlantic climate could be improved."The work was sponsored by the Risk Prediction Initiative (RPI) and had further input from Stockholm University's Bolin Centre for Climate Research. Dr. Mark Guishard of RPI said, "This work is important in the context of risk management, so it's not surprising that our industry sponsors were keen to support this research." RPI is a science-business partnership based at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, supporting researchers in academia and providing independent insights for decision makers in the insurance industry.The study also does not directly examine the potential for damage caused by the storms. Hurricane damage in a season is correlated with the overall number of hurricanes, but there is variation within those hurricanes as to the extent of that damage -- an issue that Dr. Lavender and her colleagues plan on looking into in an upcoming study. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
August 21, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180821175209.htm | NASA gets up close with Greenland's melting ice | With a new research plane and a new base to improve its chances of outsmarting Atlantic hurricanes, NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland campaign takes to the sky this week for its third year of gathering data on how the ocean around Greenland is melting its glaciers. | OMG's first two years of operations already collected the most comprehensive data available on the subject, but OMG Principal Investigator Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is hungry for more. "We're beginning to see some surprising changes in the ocean, just since the start of OMG in 2016, that are affecting the ice," said Willis, an oceanographer at JPL. "We want to see if those changes are still there after two years, and if they're spreading farther along the Greenland coast."Willis and Project Manager Steve Dinardo, also of JPL, are leaving for Greenland this week on an airborne campaign to do just that. For the third year in a row, they will drop about 250 probes just offshore all around the island, with some drops close to the fronts of ocean-terminating glaciers. The probes sink 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) into the seawater, recording temperature and salinity as they go. The researchers hope to make their first flight on Aug 22 and complete the work in two to three weeks, depending on weather.Unfortunately for OMG, the best time to drop probes into the ocean around Greenland -- the time with the most open water -- is during hurricane season. "Hurricanes go up to Greenland to die," said Dinardo. "In 2016, there were days the winds were so strong we couldn't even open the hangar doors." Weather groundings stretched the planned three-week deployment to five weeks.In 2017, weather struck closer to home: Hurricane Harvey sidelined the Houston-based plane and crew just days before the campaign was scheduled to begin. Dinardo managed to locate a viable alternative aircraft and get the OMG team airborne within a month of the originally planned start.This year's new plane and new base should improve OMG's weather odds. The plane, a Basler BT-67 operated by NASA contractor Airtec, can take off and land on a shorter runway than either of the planes OMG previously used. That allows the team to base their east coast operations in Kulusuk, a small airport in southeastern Greenland, rather than a larger airport in Iceland. The lengthy "commute" from Iceland cut into the time available for research on each flight, and the longer flight path meant more places where there might be bad weather.When they complete the east coast drops, the team will move to Thule, a U.S. air base in northwestern Greenland, for drops on the western side of the island."Being in Greenland the whole time, we can get a little more up close and personal with the ice sheet and glaciers," Willis said.The changing ocean around Greenland affects living creatures as well as glaciers. Narwhals -- smallish whales with long single tusks -- are uniquely adapted to Arctic waters, moving seasonally from the open ocean to the glacier fronts of Greenland and Canada. Kristin Laidre, a research scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, studies these elusive mammals and their habitats. She quickly saw the value of OMG's observations, publishing the first peer-reviewed paper to use OMG data.Laidre and Ian Fenty of JPL, an OMG co-principal investigator, are on the west side of Greenland from the airborne OMG team this week, on a six-day research cruise. Their team will place moorings in front of three important glaciers in northwestern Greenland, with acoustic recorders and OMG data loggers attached to the mooring chains. These instruments will log ocean temperature and conductivity (used to calculate salinity) and detections of narwhals.This intensive local data set is likely to add new insights into OMG's larger-scale measurements, Fenty said. "Because the instruments will take measurements every hour for two years, we will get a totally new understanding of the changing ocean close to the ice," he noted. "These data will help us interpret our OMG probe data and allow us to evaluate and improve our [computer] simulations of the ocean currents in the area."Laidre said, "We don't know a lot about what's important to narwhals -- how physical oceanography influences their habitat preferences. OMG is collecting really detailed information on the physics of the system. For us, having access to those data and working with the OMG investigators can bring us a long way in studying these animals." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
August 8, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180808134208.htm | Harmful bacteria thrived in post-Hurricane Harvey floodwaters | Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas on August 25, 2017, bringing more than 50 inches of rain and extreme flooding to the city of Houston. In addition to wreaking havoc on buildings and infrastructure, urban floodwaters harbor hidden menaces in the form of bacteria that can cause disease. Now, researchers have surveyed the microbes that lurked in Houston floodwaters, both inside and outside of homes. They report their results in | One of the most destructive hurricanes to hit the U.S. since Katrina in 2005, Harvey damaged more than 100,000 homes in the Houston area. In addition, the storm flooded numerous wastewater treatment plants, causing widespread discharge of untreated or partially treated sewage. Raw sewage contains fecal bacteria, like The researchers found that | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
August 6, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180806151856.htm | Children are highly vulnerable to health risks of a changing climate | Young children are far more vulnerable to climate-related disasters and the onus is on adults to provide the protection and care that children need. In a paper published in | "Children and adolescents are more vulnerable to climate change stemming from environmental pollution originating from human activity which is expected to increase the magnitude and frequency of extreme events like floods, droughts, and heatwaves and trigger humanitarian disasters," said Madeleine Thomson, PHD, research scholar in the Mailman School's Department of Environmental Health Sciences. "These emergencies enhance a wide range of environmental exposures that directly and indirectly affect children, but because of their anatomic, cognitive, immunologic, and psychologic differences, children and adolescents are more vulnerable to these adverse exposures than adults," noted Thomson, who is also a faculty member in the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia's Earth Institute and served as guest editor in For example, because of their small surface to body ratio infants and children are particularly vulnerable to dehydration and heat stress. Additionally, children are more likely to be affected by respiratory disease, renal disease, electrolyte imbalance and fever during persistent hot episodes. Heat waves have also been shown to exacerbate allergens and air pollution which impact children more severely than adults because of their underdeveloped respiratory and immune systems and their relatively high rates of respiration.Increasing temperatures may expand the potential range of many vector-borne diseases including the Zika virus which, following the 2015 epidemic, has profoundly affected the lives of children and their families across Latin America and the Caribbean. Even children who were asymptomatic at birth may also develop problems later in life.After Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017 medical responders encountered increases in gastroenteritis, asthma exacerbations and skin infections. Children were also at increased risk for mosquito-borne diseases such as Chikungunya and Dengue, as well as leptospirosis through the drinking of contaminated water. Flood waters from Hurricane Harvey a few weeks earlier dropped record breaking rain. Most of the Harvey-related toxic releases were never publicized and the long-term implications for children's health is unknown. Studies suggest that climate change is increasing the intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes and the likelihood that the severe consequences for children's health will grow.In rural households droughts can have significant impacts on child development through increased food insecurity and dietary changes. Droughts may also contribute to conflict and forced migration in resource poor settings, thereby increasing children's vulnerability to a wide range of health issues.To begin to address the specific needs of children confronted with climate-change related health disasters, Thomson and colleagues are proposing the following:Co-authors are Lawrence Stanberry, Columbia Department of Pediatrics; Wilmot James, Columbia Department of Pediatrics and School of International and Public Affairs. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
August 6, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180806104253.htm | Possible connection between U.S. tornado activity, Arctic sea ice | The effects of global climate change taking place in the Arctic may influence weather much closer to home for millions of Americans, researchers report. | The United States has experienced many changes in severe-weather behavior over the past decade, including fewer tornado touchdowns in than in the past. A new study suggests that atmospheric circulation changes that coincide with a loss of Arctic sea ice may be partly to blame.Atmospheric scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Purdue University report their findings in the journal "A relationship between Arctic sea ice and tornadoes in the U.S. may seem unlikely," said (Robert) Jeff Trapp , a professor of atmospheric sciences at the U. of I. and a co-author. "But it is hard to ignore the mounting evidence in support of the connection."The researchers performed statistical analyses of nearly three decades of historical weather and climate data and found significant correlations between tornado activity and the extent of Arctic sea ice -- especially during the month July.The team believes that the reduction in tornado activity boils down to how the diminishing Arctic sea ice controls the path of the jet stream. As Arctic sea ice retreats, the jet stream migrates from its traditional summer path over states like Montana and South Dakota to areas farther north, and the atmospheric conditions that are favorable for tornado formation follow suit."Tornadoes and their parent thunderstorms are fueled by wind shear and moisture," Trapp said. "When the jet stream migrates north, it takes the wind shear along for the ride, but not always the moisture. So, even though thunderstorms may still develop, they tend not to generate tornadoes because one of the essential ingredients for tornado formation is now missing."The team believes that the correlation between Arctic ice retreat and jet stream migration may lead to advances in seasonal severe weather prediction."One of the reasons that we focused on sea ice is because, like the ocean and land, it is relatively slow to evolve," Trapp said. "Because sea ice and the atmosphere are coupled, the response of the atmosphere is also relatively slow. We can use this property to help make long-term predictions for tornadoes and hail, similar to the way predictions are made for hurricane seasons." But before doing so, Trapp said they still need to understand the drivers of the sea ice changes and what role the tropics may be playing.It remains unclear as to why this correlation is particularly dominant during the month of July, the researchers said, and they admit that they are only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the overall effects of climate change, and climate variability, on severe weather. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
August 2, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180802141604.htm | Death toll from Hurricane Maria estimated to be larger than previously thought | The number of people who died as a result of Hurricane Maria -- which hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017 -- may be as high as 1,139, surpassing the official death count of 64, according to researchers. | The researchers used official government records to calculate the number, which took into account not just those who died from the immediate effects of the hurricane, but also from secondary effects in the following months.Alexis Raúl Santos, assistant professor of human development and family studies at Penn State, said the results -- published today (Aug. 2) in the "The Caribbean is set to be hit by more weather disasters in the future, based on forecast models, and we don't want history to repeat itself," Santos said. "If we have a better idea of the damage that Hurricane Maria actually did, then maybe we can use that experience to inform and reshape protocols, policies and emergency management processes."Although the official death toll for Hurricane Maria still stands at 64, other estimates have previously placed the toll significantly higher. The official death toll counts only those with a "hurricane-related" cause of death on their death certificates, while other estimates have used data from government agencies or surveys, which may not be reliable.For the study, the researchers used official government records of deaths -- vital statistics records -- to find how many people died from any cause in Puerto Rico from January 2010 through December 2017. The data from before Hurricane Maria hit in September 2017 was used to determine the average expected deaths for each month.When the researchers compared how many people actually died in September through December 2017 (the month of Hurricane Maria as well as the following three months) to the projected estimate, they found that approximately 1,139 more people died than expected, based on previous patterns. There were an additional 459 deaths in September, 564 in October and 116 in November. By December, the death count had returned to levels within the historical range.Santos said that beyond those who died during and immediately after the hurricane, additional deaths in the months following could be contributed to the weather disaster, as well."When the area is flooded and without power, that's not a safe environment for a grandmother on dialysis," Santos said. "That's not a safe environment for someone who has an asthma attack and may need therapy. Essentially, that's what we're trying to address. Not just the people who drowned or died in landslides, but also the people who died because they didn't have access to their basic needs."Santos said that while the damage from Hurricane Maria has already been done, he hopes the research can also help encourage cooperation between researchers and government."One of our aims is to start creating linkages between academia and the government to see how we can help and make things better for the future," Santos said. "Academia is here to help. All of us care deeply, we care about society and people, and want to help make things better for the future."Jeffrey T. Howard, University of Texas at San Antonio, also worked on this research. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
August 1, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180801093703.htm | Fecal bacteria contaminated surface water after Hurricane Harvey | Hurricane Harvey was an unprecedented rain event that delivered five consistent days of flooding and storms to Texas last August. Now, research from UTSA Assistant Professor Vikram Kapoor in civil and environmental engineering has substantiated that the storm caused high levels of fecal contamination to be introduced into waterways draining into the Gulf of Mexico and impairing surface water quality. | Kapoor's research assessed microbial contaminants in southeast and southcentral Texas waterways following Hurricane Harvey. His work was supported by a Rapid Response Research grant from the National Science Foundation."The research we conducted in the Guadalupe River after Hurricane Harvey substantiates that the large number of sewage overflows and storm-water runoff that occurred during Hurricane Harvey flooding introduced high levels of fecal bacteria into environmental waters."After 800 wastewater treatment plants reported spills from flooding and more than two million pounds of contaminants were released into the environment, the study reports that the sewage overflows posed a risk to human and environmental health via waterborne disease outbreaks, deterioration of recreational and drinking water quality and the degradation of aquatic ecology. The report further confirms how hurricanes and large storms play a significant role in the transport of water contaminants across environmental waters.Kapoor selected the Guadalupe River because it is an important drinking water source for several cities and is used in part for recreational activities. The river runs from Kerr County, Texas to the San Antonio Bay in the Gulf of Mexico. Excessive rainfall from Hurricane Harvey resulted in major flooding over the Guadalupe River in Victoria, Texas. The river crested at 32 feet, around 10 feet above flood stage.Notably, all initial water samples collected from the flooded regions of the Guadalupe River by Kapoor and his students contained During Spring Break 2018, officials published alerts concerning fecal matter at some Texas beaches. While Kapoor says it's too early to tell if those beaches were impacted as a result of Hurricane Harvey, he notes that he and his students observed elevated levels of fecal bacteria at flooded sites even two to three months after Harvey.The UTSA environmental engineering professor is hopeful that his research on the short and long-term effects of Hurricane Harvey's flooding will lead to the development of a predictive framework to assess wastewater contamination following severe flooding."We are conducting research at UTSA on the mobilization of microbial contaminants and the length of time they persist in affected areas," he said. "The results will improve how scientists evaluate the human health impacts of contaminants mobilized and deposited by floodwaters." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 30, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180730145424.htm | Solar flares disrupted radio communications during September 2017 Atlantic hurricanes | An unlucky coincidence of space and Earth weather in early September 2017 caused radio blackouts for hours during critical hurricane emergency response efforts, according to a new study in | On September 6, three hurricanes advanced in a menacing line across the Atlantic Ocean. Category 5 Hurricane Irma ravaged Barbuda in the Caribbean's Leeward Islands in the early morning and churned onward to St. Marin, St. Barthelemy, Anguilla and the Virgin Islands, causing massive damage. Tropical Storm Katia hovered in the Gulf of Mexico and Tropical Storm Jose approached from the open ocean. Both were upgraded to hurricane status later that day.On the surface of the Sun, 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) away, another storm was brewing. A class X-2.2 and major class X-9.3 solar flare erupted on the morning of September 6 at about 8 a.m. local time. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center warned of a strong radio blackout over most the sunlit side of Earth, including the Caribbean.Amateur radio operators assisting with emergency communications in the islands reported to the Hurricane Watch Net that radio communications went down for most of the morning and early afternoon on September 6 because of the Sun's activity, according to the new study. French civil aviation reported a 90-minute loss of communication with a cargo plane, according to the study's authors, and NOAA reported on September 14 that high frequency radio, used by aviation, maritime, ham radio, and other emergency bands, was unavailable for up to eight hours on September 6.Another large class-X flare erupted from the Sun on September 10, disrupting radio communication for three hours. The disruption came as the Caribbean community coped with Category 4 Hurricane Jose's brush with the Leeward Islands and the Bahamas, and Irma's passage over Little Inagua in the Bahamas on September 8 and passage over Cuba on September 9."Space weather and Earth weather aligned to heighten an already tense situation in the Caribbean," said Rob Redmon, a space scientist with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Boulder, Colorado, and the lead author of the new study. "If I head on over to my amateur radio operator, and they have been transmitting messages for me, whether it be for moving equipment or finding people or just saying I'm okay to somebody else, suddenly I can't do that on this day, and that would be pretty stressful."Bobby Graves, an experienced ham radio operator who manages the Hurricane Watch Net from his home near Jackson, Mississippi, said the flares caused communications to go down for hours. The Hurricane Watch Net is a group of licensed amateur radio operators trained and organized to provide communications support to the National Hurricane Center during storm emergencies."You can hear a solar flare on the air as it's taking place. It's like hearing bacon fry in a pan, it just all of a sudden gets real staticky and then it's like someone just turns the light completely off, you don't hear anything. And that's what happened this last year on two occasions," Graves said. "We had to wait 'til the power of those solar flares weakened so that our signals could actually bounce back off the atmosphere. It was a helpless situation."The new study detailing the activity on the Sun and its effects on radio communications from September 4 -- 13 serves as an overview to a collection of journal articles in The information in the study could help scientists improve space weather forecasting and response, according to the study's authors. By understanding how the events on the Sun and Earth unfolded, scientists can better understand how to forecast and prepare for future events, they said.The new study shows the solar flares affected shortwave radio communications, which were being used by amateurs and professionals in emergency response efforts, although it does not detail how emergency efforts may have been affected by the radio blackout."Safeguards put in place to prevent dangerous disruption to GPS from solar events worked," said Mike Hapgood, head of space weather at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom, and a scientist not connected to the new study. "In many ways, we were ready. Some things that could have caused big problems didn't, but shortwave radio is always tricky to use during solar events. But good radio operators are aware of the events and will work hard to overcome problems.""It's the Sun reminding us that it's there," Hapgood added. "The Sun's been very quiet for the last 10 years. It reminds people not to be complacent."The 2017 flares were the largest since 2005 and the best documented solar storm to date, observed from a fleet of spacecraft between the Earth and the Sun, in Earth's orbit, on Earth and Mars.Solar flares release bursts of X-rays from the Sun that travel outwards in all directions at the speed of light. Strong flares can disrupt radio and aviation communications. Space weather forecasters have only minutes to broadcast warnings to spacecraft, aviation and other administrators before affects are felt on Earth.X-rays from solar flares interact with Earth's atmosphere 50-1000 kilometers (30-600 miles) above the Earth, in a region called the ionosphere. Shortwave radio communication works by bouncing signals off the ionosphere and refracting them back to Earth. When the Sun releases a burst of x-rays, like the flares released in early September, the extra energy delivered to the ionosphere can cause it to absorb high frequency radio signals, like those used by ham radio enthusiasts.The September 6 and 10 flares were also accompanied by bursts of high energy solar material explosively ejected from the Sun in an expanding bubble much larger than the Earth. Such coronal mass ejections, which arrive within one to three days, have the potential to wreck the most havoc on human technology. The geomagnetic storms generated by coronal mass ejections can damage power grids, confuse GPS systems and damage or disrupt communication with spacecraft, including weather satellites.NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued warnings for potentially severe geomagnetic storms for September 7-9.The unexpected burst of space weather coincided with high hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean.Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record with sustained winds of 287 kilometers per hour (175 miles per hour), hit the tiny island of Barbuda at maximum intensity, razing 95 percent of its buildings. The storm destroyed most homes and much infrastructure on St. Martin, Anguilla, Great Inagua and Crooked Island in the Bahamas, and the U.S. and British Virgin Islands. It caused power outages and damage in the Cuban Keys, Turks and Caicos and the southeastern United States. Wind and rain from the storm killed 37 people in the Caribbean and 10 on the U.S. mainland, according the National Hurricane Center.During the September crisis, the Caribbean Emergency and Weather Net logged many "radiograms" relaying survival notes between anxious family members on the islands and the mainland via ham radio operators, Redmon said."Seeing that logbook really brought home to me the human dimension of the storm," Redmon said. "It put the humanity in the science."Ham radio hobbyists routinely volunteer to disseminate hazard information from the National Weather Service to island communities and ships during major storms, report real-time ground conditions and damages back to the National Hurricane Center, and assist the Red Cross with communications.Graves, the ham radio operator, said many people trapped by storms appreciate hearing a friendly voice over amateur radio relaying the latest weather update, even if they are not able to reply. During a storm, ham radio volunteers strain to listen for lone stations in the affected area that may still be transmitting, Graves said."A lot of folks in the area were asking us: We heard there's Jose coming behind Irma, what's this thing going to do?" he said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 26, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180726160455.htm | Flood detection a surprising capability of microsatellites mission | Hurricanes bring heavy rainfall and strong winds to coastal communities, a potent combination that can lead to devastating damage. In 2016 NASA launched a set of eight satellites called the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS, mission to gather more data on the winds in these tropical cyclones as part of an effort to increase data coverage of hurricanes and aid forecasts. As the first year of data is being evaluated, a new and unexpected capability has emerged: the ability to see through clouds and rain to flooded landscapes. | The flood maps are possible thanks to one of the innovations of the CYGNSS constellation. The microwave signal the CYGNSS satellites use to detect wind speed based on the choppiness of the ocean is actually not generated by the satellites at all. Instead the satellites use the constant and ubiquitous signals from the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system, which is also responsive to reflections from standing water and the amount of moisture in the soil."Before about 2015, people had inklings that you could use GPS reflection data over land to look at various things, but there hadn't been many observations to prove it," said Clara Chew, a researcher at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. "With the launch of CYGNSS we've finally been able to really prove that yes, these signals are very sensitive to the amount of water either in the soil or on the surface."Chew developed flood inundation maps of the Texas coastline after Hurricane Harvey and of Cuba after Hurricane Irma, as well as flood maps of the Amazon River in Brazil, which overflows its banks seasonally."When we made our first complete map of the Amazon, everyone was really shocked because you can see a lot of the tiniest, tiniest rivers throughout the basin, and nobody knew that we were going to see rivers a hundred meters wide or so in the data," Chew said, noting that the native resolution of data over the ocean varies between 10 and 15 km and it is averaged to a consistent 25 kilometers."When I saw the first land images of inland water bodies, I was amazed at their quality," said Chris Ruf, CYGNSS's principal investigator at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "We had known beforehand that there would be some instances of coherent scattering possible. That's the phenomenon that creates such high-resolution images. It rarely happens over the ocean and we hadn't really considered how often it might happen over land. It turns out that it happens quite frequently, and almost always when observing small inland water bodies. This promises to open up entirely new areas of scientific investigation."CYGNSS's advantage over other space-based sensors for flood detection is its ability to see through clouds, rain and vegetation that may otherwise obscure floodwaters. Currently, flood detection is generally done by optical sensors on the U.S. Geological Survey-NASA Landsat satellites, which can't see through clouds, and the microwave sensors on the European Space Agency's Sentinel 1 and 2, which can't see through vegetation. Capturing data from eight satellites instead of one is another advantage because it decreases the time between observations for locations, meaning more coverage, more rapidly, of flooding in the tropics. Together this means CYGNSS could bridge gaps in current coverage.However, this type of detection is still in its early days of development, and Chew and others are exploring how to infer the amount of water present and other parameters to complement soil moisture and flood data from other satellites. In addition, CYGNSS data currently takes two days to go from observation to data users."It's very fitting that one of the new things that CYGNSS is unexpectedly good at determining, the extent of flood inundation, is very often a direct consequence of the thing it was designed to measure, namely hurricanes," Ruf said. "So now, not only will we be able to observe the hurricanes while they are over the ocean, we will now also be able to map much of the damage they cause from flooding after landfall." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 26, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180726090037.htm | Leggy lizards and hurricane survival | Nobody knows exactly what happens at the eye of the storm. | But biologists at Washington University in St. Louis have published a first-of-its-kind look at the physical characteristics of lizards that seem to make the difference between life and death in a hurricane, as reported in the July 25 issue of the journal Hint: long, strong back legs do not help like you think they might.The hyperactive 2017 hurricane season was one of the worst ever experienced in the Atlantic Ocean region. Damage from totals for the hurricane season topped $282 billion -- the costliest on record. Hurricane Harvey hit in mid-August 2017, followed just a few weeks later by Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria in September. Each of these storms had winds in excess of 125 mph, with Irma up to 170 mph.For humans, the devastation to homes and businesses was extreme. For tropical anole lizards living on the more remote cays of Turks and Caicos, there was only the ones who survived -- and the ones who didn't.And that's where the researchers came in, using data serendipitously collected just before the storms hit, and again weeks afterward, to demonstrate for the first time the effects of hurricane-induced natural selection."Hurricanes are in the news, and it seems that they're becoming more destructive," said Jonathan Losos, the William H. Danforth Distinguished Professor at Washington University and professor of biology in Arts & Sciences. "Something like this has never been documented before because it's so difficult. The timing had to be just right."Colin Donihue is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University who is conducting research with Losos, who was previously at Harvard. Last September, Donihue was just wrapping up his measurements of endemic Turks and Caicos anole, The sky was still bright blue, but the weather forecasters were getting anxious. As Donihue quickly gathered his stuff and headed for the airport, his local cab driver was more skeptical: This storm would blow over, he told Donihue, just like others had done in the past.Four days later, Hurricane Irma made landfall on Sept. 8, 2017. Donihue read the news of its devastation from his apartment in Boston. He realized his lizard data might have value outside of its original intent.Donihue had the last eyes on the population before an unthinkable natural disaster. Now, it was time to determine if the storms had been a "selective event" -- an event with the power to change the course of life not just for the lizards that had weathered them, but potentially for the generations that followed.So Donihue started making calls. The Turks and Caicos government was in recovery mode; clean water, electricity and shelter were priorities, and basic phone and Internet services were still not available across the islands. But Donihue had made good connections during his recent trip, and one government scientist in particular was sympathetic to his pleas. A new set of biological permits was granted, and Donihue and study co-author Anthony Herrel of the Paris Museum were back on a plane.Back on the experimental islands, it was a mess. Trees were down and tree-limbs strewn about, making it difficult to walk in some places. But there were signs of life."Heading back to Pine Cay, we weren't sure what we'd find, but when we got to the field and saw a few lizards running around, we were eager to get catching and start measuring," said Donihue, who holds a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded fellowship that will bring him to Washington University in the winter of 2019."We walked exactly the same transects we had the last time," Donihue said. "There were definitely fewer lizards. We had to work harder to catch our sample size."The team spent two days collecting just shy of 100 lizards on two separate islands, then measured their forelimbs, hindlimbs and core body lengths, and took pictures of their toe pads.The vital statistics of the survivors could be compared with the measurements of the general lizard population that had been collected before the storm."The prediction was that if we saw any changes, they would be changes in the features that help lizards hold on -- they would be related to clinging ability," Donihue said. "For example, the sticky toe pads on their fingers and toes, maybe they would be larger."Comparing lizards collected before and after the storm, the researchers found that the survivor populations on both islands had larger toe pads on both their forelimbs and hindlimbs.The survivors had proportionately longer fore legs than the initial/pre-hurricane population, while the long bones in between their hips and knees on their back legs (their femurs) were shorter. The survivor population had smaller bodies, too. The observations were statistically significant and consistent at both island sites.Hurricanes bring death and destruction to those in their paths. There are well-documented recent examples of hurricanes killing off large numbers of individuals from many species as diverse as plants, sea sponges, insects, birds and monkeys."With regard to evolution, the question is whether hurricanes cause selective mortality: do individuals with certain traits survive better than individuals with different traits? The alternative possibility -- that devastation is so massive that mortality is indiscriminate, not favoring some individuals over others -- is certainly possible," Losos said.The results of this study -- that the island populations of lizards both changed significantly, and in the same way from before the hurricanes to after -- suggest that natural selection favored individuals with certain characteristics.Of course, as the authors point out, there are other possibilities."Perhaps the hurricane blew in lizards with bigger toepads and shorter hindlegs from another island. Or perhaps the act of clinging to the branches in high winds actually caused their forelegs to get longer," Losos said. "We can't rule these possibilities out because this study was the result of serendipity, rather than specifically being designed to test the effect of hurricanes."Still, hurricane-induced natural selection seems like the best explanation for these findings," Losos said.The missing piece of the story is still a behavioral one. Researchers don't know what lizards actually do in the middle of a hurricane. Do they abandon their typical tree perches and go to the ground? Or do they try to seek cover in notches or crevices within the trees? Or do they just hang on?A pilot study exploring wind threshold provides some insight into this aspect of the lizard decision-making process.When the researchers exposed lizards from the survivor population to hurricane-force winds, the lizards almost uniformly swiveled around their perches to the side opposite from the wind source -- and just held on tight. As wind speeds increased, they lost hold with their hindlimbs first, and were left hanging by their forelimbs.It appears that lizards are built to cling, but because of their stance on the perch, their big hindlimbs make them vulnerable to getting pushed off by high winds. This could explain the pattern that survivor lizards have longer forelimbs and shorter hindlimbs after a hurricane, the researchers speculate.Understanding how storms select for species survival is an important area of future study, worthy of a dedicated study design."We know that hurricanes are getting more frequent, and we know that they're getting more strong," Donihue said. "So, setting up a network of sites that are actually set up to investigate the question of how hurricanes are changing the evolutionary trajectory of species I think could be really useful." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 20, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180720154909.htm | Sahara dust may make you cough, but it's a storm killer | The bad news: Dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa -- totaling a staggering 2 to 9 trillion pounds worldwide -- has been almost a biblical plague on Texas and much of the Southern United States in recent weeks. The good news: the same dust appears to be a severe storm killer. | Research from a team of scientists led by Texas A&M University has studied Saharan dust and their work is published in the current issue of the Texas A&M's Bowen Pan, Tim Logan, and Renyi Zhang in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences analyzed recent NASA satellite images and computer models and said the Saharan dust is composed of sand and other mineral particles that are swept up in air currents and pushed over the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico and other nearby regions.As the dust-laden air moves, it creates a temperature inversion which in turn tends to prevent cloud -- and eventually -- storm formation.It means fewer storms and even hurricanes are less likely to strike when the dust is present."The Saharan dust will reflect and absorb sunlight, therefore reduce the sunlight at the Earth's surface," said Pan."If we have more frequent and severe dust storms, it's likely that we have a cooler sea surface temperature and land surface temperature. The storms have less energy supply from the colder surface therefore will be less severe."The study goes on to show that dust and storm formation don't mix."Our results show significant impacts of dust on the radiative budget, hydrological cycle, and large-scale environments relevant to tropical cyclone activity over the Atlantic," said Zhang."Dust may decrease the sea surface temperature, leading to suppression of hurricanes. For the dust intrusion over the past few days, it was obvious that dust suppressed cloud formation in our area. Basically, we saw few cumulus clouds over the last few days. Dust particles reduce the radiation at the ground, but heats up in the atmosphere, both leading to more stable atmosphere. Such conditions are unfavorable for cloud formation."Zhang said that the chances of a hurricane forming tended to be much less and "our results show that dust may reduce the occurrence of hurricanes over the Gulf of Mexico region."Logan said that recent satellite images clearly show the Saharan dust moving into much of the Gulf of Mexico and southern Texas."The movement of the dust is there," Zhang said, "but predictions of dust storms can be very challenging." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 18, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180718152237.htm | Researchers to present new results on hurricanes and other extreme events | In the past year, extreme events -- including hurricanes, droughts and wildfires -- have plagued the U.S., affecting natural habitats and human communities. | The theme of the 2018 Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting reflects the importance of these natural disasters. Conference participants will present the latest research findings on "extreme events, resilience and human well-being."The meeting takes place Aug. 5 to 10 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, a city still rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina more than a decade ago.Worldwide, sea level is rising and river deltas are sinking, threatening the millions of people who live near these deltas.The opening plenary talk by Robert Twilley of Louisiana State University, "Ecosystem design approaches in the highly engineered landscape of the Mississippi River Delta," focuses on research funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Coastal Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) program. Twilley will also discuss globally threatened deltas in the presentation, "The resilience of coastal deltaic floodplains." The study is supported by NSF's Coastal SEES program.More than 100 additional conference presentations and posters will feature research by scientists funded through NSF's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER), Critical Zone Observatories (CZO) and Biological Oceanography programs, among others. Twenty-eight NSF LTER and nine NSF CZO sites allow scientists to make sustained observations of extreme and unexpected events such as hurricanes. Long-term experiments at these sites provide researchers with opportunities to answer the question: "What conditions foster resilience?"LTER and CZO sites in Puerto Rico, Florida and Georgia were hit hard by the 2017 hurricane season. Resilience in the face of repeated salt water flooding and forest damage has been challenging.Scientists are now conducting research on the role of rainfall variability in ecosystems from tropical and coastal forests to estuaries and salt marshes. Nutrient and other experiments are also offering new insights into the interactions among myriad short-term and long-term environmental stresses. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 18, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180718152228.htm | More category 5 hurricanes forecasted by scientists | In the midst of hurricane season, climatologists around the world are monitoring tropical storm formations that have the potential to escalate into deadly hurricanes. The Atlantic hurricane season included 17 named storms last year, many of which proved to be costly and destructive for communities in their path. Hurricanes are becoming stronger and wetter due to rising sea and air temperatures. | Saharan dust storms can also play a role in hurricane formation. Researchers at Chapman University have learned from studying 2012's Hurricane Sandy, that we are more likely to see larger, more powerful hurricanes in the future."Although Sandy was a Category 3 storm when it made landfall in Cuba, it became the largest Atlantic hurricane on record when measured by diameter, with winds spanning 900 miles," said Chapman University Climatologist Hesham El-Askary, Ph.D.A Saharan dust event occurring in West Africa weeks before Sandy had formed carried large amounts of mineral dust into the troposphere, filling the tropical wave that became Sandy with aerosols along a majority of its path. By monitoring dust storms, Dr. El-Askary was able to tie this occurrence to the role it played in the hurricane's development from a Category 1 to a Category 3 storm. With this work, he hopes to provide more accurate forecasting for these types of extreme weather occurrences. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 16, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180716114613.htm | Mangroves to mudflats and not back again | Over one-third of Earth's population lives with 100 km of a coastline and depend on the services that coastal ecosystems provide. With the intensity and impact of hurricanes expected to increase in the future, there is a need to understand how coastal ecosystems will be impacted by and recover from hurricanes, and how these changes will influence human well-being. | Coastal ecosystems such as mangrove forests are highly susceptible to effects from hurricanes. Hurricanes can provide valuable sediments and nutrients that promote plant growth and increase the stability of some coastal ecosystems. However, storm surge, saltwater intrusion, wind, and extreme rainfall can knock down forests, lead to erosion, and transform plant communities. This can lead to an abrupt and irreversible ecosystem transformation.In a southwestern section of Everglades National Park, hurricanes may have contributed to the conversion of mangrove forests to lower-elevation mudflats. The mangrove forests offer some protection from storm surge and can provide habitat stability. Long-term transformation to mudflats would have serious effects on the ability of coastal wetlands to persist against hurricanes and rising sea levels.United States Geological Survey (USGS) scientists have measured surface elevation changes in these mangroves and adjacent mudflats for nearly 20 years, including changes brought on by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and Hurricane Irma in 2017. Michael J. Osland, a USGS research ecologist, will speak on this research at the 2018 ESA Annual Meeting in August.They found that over the last two decades, rates of elevation change in the mangrove forests and the un-vegetated mudflats have been very different. While the soil elevation in the mangroves has been relatively stable, the mudflats have been losing elevation. The data highlight the ability of mangrove trees to reduce elevation loss and minimize erosion while promoting wetland stability through root production. Their findings also indicate that the effects of mangrove conversion to mudflats are long-lasting, with negative impacts on the resilience of these ecosystems against extreme events. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 11, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180711182759.htm | NASA surveys hurricane damage to Puerto Rico's forests | On Sept. 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria barreled across Puerto Rico with winds of up to 155 miles per hour and battering rain that flooded towns, knocked out communications networks and destroyed the power grid. In the rugged central mountains and the lush northeast, Maria unleashed its fury as fierce winds completely defoliated the tropical forests and broke and uprooted trees. Heavy rainfall triggered thousands of landslides that mowed over swaths of steep mountainsides. | In April a team of NASA scientists traveled to Puerto Rico with airborne instrumentation to survey damages from Hurricane Maria to the island's forests."From the air, the scope of the hurricane's damages was startling," said NASA Earth scientist Bruce Cook, who led the campaign. "The dense, interlocking canopies that blanketed the island before the storm were reduced to a tangle of downed trees and isolated survivors, stripped of their branches."NASA's Earth-observing satellites monitor the world's forests to detect seasonal changes in vegetation cover or abrupt forest losses from deforestation, but at spatial and time scales that are too coarse to see changes. To get a more detailed look, NASA flew an airborne instrument called Goddard's Lidar, Hyperspectral and Thermal Imager, or G-LiHT. From the belly of a small aircraft flying one thousand feet above the trees, G-LiHT collected multiple measurements of forests across the island, including high-resolution photographs, surface temperatures and the heights and structure of the vegetation.The U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NASA provided funding for the airborne campaign.The team flew many of the same tracks with G-LiHT as it had in the spring of 2017, months before Hurricane Maria made landfall, as part of a study of how tropical forests regrow on abandoned agricultural land. The before-and-after comparison shows forests across the island still reeling from the hurricane's impact.Using lidar, a ranging system that fires 600,000 laser pulses per second, the team measured changes in the height and structure of the Puerto Rican forests. The damage is palpable. Forests near the city of Arecibo on the northern side of the island grow on limestone hills with little soil to stabilize trees. As a result, the hurricane snapped or uprooted 60 percent of the trees there. In the northeast, on the slopes of El Yunque National Forest, the hurricane trimmed the forests, reducing their average height by one-third.Data from G-LiHT is not only being used to capture the condition of the island's forests; it is an important research tool for scientists who are tracking how the forests are changing as they recover from such a major event."[Hurricane] Maria pressed the reset button on many of the different processes that develop forests over time," said Doug Morton, an Earth scientist at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center and G-LiHT co-investigator. "Now we're watching a lot of those processes in fast-forward speeds as large areas of the island are recovering, with surviving trees and new seedlings basking in full sunlight."Among the areas that the team flew over extensively was El Yunque National Forest, which Hurricane Maria struck at full force. The U.S. Forest Service manages El Yunque, a tropical rainforest, as well as its designated research plots, which were established in the late 1930s. University and government scientists perform all manner of research, including measuring individual trees to track their growth, counting flowers and seeds to monitor reproduction, and analyzing soil samples to track the nutrients needed for plant growth.One important assessment of a tree's health is its crown, which comprises the overall shape of a treetop, with its branches, stems and leaves. Hurricane winds can heavily damage tree crowns and drastically reduce the number of leaves for creating energy through photosynthesis."Just seven months after the storm, surviving trees are flushing new leaves and regrowing branches in order to regain their ability to harvest sunlight through photosynthesis," Morton said, while also noting that the survival of damaged trees in the years ahead is an open question.While it's difficult to assess tree crowns in detail from the ground, from the air G-LiHT's lidar instrument can derive the shape and structure of all of the trees in its flight path. The airborne campaign over Puerto Rico was extensive enough to provide information on the structure and composition of the overall forest canopy, opening up a range of research possibilities."Severe storms like Maria will favor some species and destroy others," said Maria Uriarte, an ecologist at Columbia University who has studied El Yunque National Forest for 15 years and is working with the NASA team to validate flight data with ground observations. "Plot level studies tell us how this plays out in a small area but the damage at any particular place depends on proximity to the storm's track, topography, soils and the characteristics of each forest patch. This makes it hard to generalize to other forests in the island."But with G-LiHT data scientists can study the storm impacts over a much larger area, Uriarte continued. "What's really exciting is that we can ask a completely different set of questions," she said. "Why does one area have more damage than others? What species are being affected the most across the island?"Understanding the state of the forest canopy also has far-reaching implications for the rest of the ecosystem, as tree cover is critical to the survival of many species. For example, birds such as the native Iguaca parrot use the canopy to hide from predator hawks. The canopy also creates a cooler, humid environment that is conducive to the growth of tree seedlings and lizards and frogs that inhabit the forest floor. Streams that are cooled by the dense shade also make them habitable for a wide diversity of other organisms.Yet by that same token, other plants and animals that were once at a disadvantage are now benefiting from changes brought about by the loss of canopy."Some lizards live in the canopy, where they thrive in drier, more sunlit conditions," said herpetologist Neftali Ríos-López, an associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Humacao Campus. "Because of the hurricane those drier conditions that were once exclusive to the canopy are now extended down to the forest floor. As a result, those animals are better adapted to those conditions and have started displacing and substituting animals that are adapted to the once cooler conditions.""Who are the winners and losers in this new environment? That's an important question in all of this," said NASA's Doug Morton. During the airborne campaign, he spent several days in the research plots of El Yunque taking three-dimensional images of the forest floor to complement the data from G-LiHT. He said it's clear that the palms, which weathered the hurricane winds better than other broad-leafed trees, are among the current beneficiaries of the now sun-drenched forest. And that's not a bad thing."Palm trees are going to form a major component of the canopy of this forest for the next decade or more, and in some ways they'll help to facilitate the recovery of the rest of this forest," Morton said. "Palms provide a little bit of shade and protection for the flora and fauna that are recolonizing the area. That's encouraging."The implications of this research extend beyond the forest ecosystem, both in time and space, said Grizelle Gonzalez, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and project lead for the research plots in El Yunque. As an example, she pointed out that the hurricane caused the mountain streams to flood and fill with sediment that ultimately flowed into the ocean. Sediment can negatively impact the quality of the drinking water as well as the coral communities that fisheries depend on for both subsistence and commerce."It's beautiful to see that so many federal agencies came together to collaborate on this important work because forests play a key role in everything from biodiversity and the economy to public health," Gonzalez said.G-LiHT data also has global implications. In July, the team heads to Alaska to continue surveying the vast forestland in the state's interior to better understand the impacts of accelerated Arctic warming on boreal forests, which, in turn, play a key role in cooling Earth's climate by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. "G-LiHT allows us to collect research data at the scale of individual trees across broad landscapes," Morton said. "Forests from Alaska to Puerto Rico are constantly changing in response to climate warming and disturbances such as fire and hurricanes." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 5, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180705125718.htm | Coastal nuisance flooding linked to special type of slow-moving ocean wave | A team of international researchers has found a link between seasonal fluctuations in sea level to a long-time phenomenon -- Rossby Waves. And this connection may lead to a new tool to help coastal communities, such as Miami, better anticipate and mitigate "nuisance flooding" impacts. | "We've known for a long time that sea level is rising and that there are also important fluctuations happening on different time scales, including seasonal variations, which are the reason that nuisance flooding in cities like Miami typically occurs in late summer or early fall," said University of Central Florida coastal engineer Thomas Wahl, who was part of the research team."We can predict high tide and low tide and we know what causes sea level to vary seasonally, but we found that in some years the seasonal fluctuations are much larger along the Gulf and U.S. southeast coasts than in others, causing more nuisance flooding and increasing flood risk from storm surges during the hurricane season. These unusually large seasonal fluctuations were poorly understood and Rossby Waves appear to be the missing piece."The team's findings are published in today's Rossby Waves, sometimes referred to as planetary waves, result mainly from the rotation of the Earth and they travel very slowly; it can take them months or even years to cross the oceans. Tracking them, and knowing how they can escalate the risk of nuisance flooding, provides the opportunity to forecast periods when tides are dangerously high several months before it happens, Wahl said."Using this information can help us develop an operational tool that gives home and business owners, as well as city managers the much-needed time to prepare and mitigate the negative impacts" he added.Nuisance flooding, or sometimes called sunny-day flooding, occurs because of high tides, sea-level rise, land subsidence and the loss of natural barriers, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The federal agency found that this kind of flooding causes such public inconveniences as frequent road closures. It overwhelms storm drains and compromises infrastructure and this type of flooding "has increased in the U.S. on average by about 50 percent since 20 years ago and 100 percent since 30 years ago."Miami is no stranger to this kind of flooding. Some years the city has faced more of it compared to others and until this team completed its study, the driving forces weren't well understood. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
July 2, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180702094026.htm | Below-average hurricane activity forecast for 2018 | Hurricane season didn't officially start until June 1, but Subtropical Storm Alberto made an appearance early, causing more than $50 million in damage as it made its way inland and up the coast in late May. Twelve people -- seven in Cuba and five in the U.S. -- died as Alberto's fallout included flooding, landslides, tornadoes and mudslides. | Is Alberto's early-season appearance an indicator of another active Atlantic hurricane season? Not necessarily, according to predictions by researchers at the University of Arizona.The UA forecasting model predicted a below-average number of hurricanes for the 2018 hurricane season, which runs through November 30. UA researchers are predicting four hurricanes, two of which will be major hurricanes, defined as those reaching Category 3, 4 or 5. That forecast falls below the median of seven hurricanes with two majors.The UA prediction is among the lowest of all published forecasts, which include predictions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the London, United Kingdom-based consortium Tropical Storm Risk and other universities.Last year, the UA's forecast was among the highest -- 11 hurricanes with six majors -- and came closest to hitting the mark. The 2017 hurricane season ended with 10 hurricanes and six majors, making it the most active since 2005 and the seventh-most active in the NOAA's historical records dating back to 1851. Last year, Irma (Florida) and Maria (Puerto Rico) were 5s, and Harvey (Texas) and Jose (offshore Caribbean) were 4s.Xubin Zeng, his former graduate student Kyle Davis, and former UA professor Elizabeth Ritchie developed the UA's hurricane forecasting model, which has proved to be extremely accurate over the last four years."Since we began issuing our annual hurricane prediction in 2014, our average error is 1.5 hurricanes," said Zeng, director of the UA's Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Center, a professor of atmospheric sciences and the Agnes N. Haury Endowed Chair in Environment in the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences at the UA.A main factor in this year's prediction is the low sea surface temperatures over the Atlantic, where little warming occurred from April to May. The sea surface temperatures are the lowest Zeng and his team have seen since 2014, but similar to long-term average temperatures. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation index in May, which describes multidecadal climate variability in the North Atlantic, is zero, which is below the threshold at which El Niño would affect hurricane activity in the UA model."These conditions imply an average year for hurricane activities; however, tropical Atlantic Ocean surface easterly wind -- from east to west, the so-called trade wind -- is stronger than in most years," Zeng said. "This implies a stronger wind shear, which usually reduces hurricane activities. Therefore, together, we predict a slightly below average year for hurricane activities."If the 2018 UA hurricane forecast is as accurate as it has been over the last few years, the U.S. can expect smoother sailing as it continues to recover from an estimated $282.16 billion in damages caused last year during one of the most catastrophic hurricane seasons in history. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
June 8, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180608003209.htm | Hurricanes are slowing down, and that's bad news | Some hurricanes are moving more slowly, spending increased time over land and leading to catastrophic local rainfall and flooding, according to a new study published Wednesday (June 6) in the journal | While hurricanes batter coastal regions with destructive wind speeds, study author James Kossin says the speed at which hurricanes track along their paths -- their translational speed -- can also play a role in the damage and devastation they cause. Their movement influences how much rain falls in a given area.This is especially true as global temperatures increase."Just a 10 percent slowdown in hurricane translational speed can double the increase in rainfall totals caused by 1 degree Celsius of global warming," says Kossin, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Center for Weather and Climate. He is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.The study compared 68 years (1949-2016) of worldwide hurricane track and intensity data, known as best-track data, from NOAA to identify changes in translational speeds. It found that, worldwide, hurricane translational speeds have averaged a 10 percent slowdown in that time.One recent storm highlights the potential consequences of this slowing trend. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey stalled over eastern Texas rather than dissipating over land, as hurricanes tend to do. It drenched Houston and nearby areas with as much as 50 inches of rain over several days, shattering historic records and leaving some areas under several feet of water.How much hurricanes have slowed depends on where they occur, Kossin found. "There is regional variation in the slowdown rates when looking at the 10 percent global average across the same time frame," he says.The most significant slowdown, 20 percent, occurred in the Western North Pacific Region, an area that includes Southeast Asia. Nearby, in the Australian Region, Kossin identified a reduction of 15 percent. In the North Atlantic Region, which includes the U.S., Kossin found a 6 percent slowdown in the speeds at which hurricanes move.When further isolating the analysis to hurricane speeds over land, where their impact is greatest, Kossin found that slowdown rates can be even greater. Hurricanes over land in the North Atlantic have slowed by as much as 20 percent, and those in the Western North Pacific as much as 30 percent.Kossin attributes this, in part, to the effects of climate change, amplified by human activity. Hurricanes move from place to place based on the strength of environmental steering winds that push them along. But as the Earth's atmosphere warms, these winds may weaken, particularly in places like the tropics, where hurricanes frequently occur, leading to slower-moving storms.Additionally, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, potentially increasing the amount of rain a hurricane can deliver to an area.The study complements others that demonstrate climate change is affecting hurricane behavior.For instance, in 2014, Kossin showed that hurricanes are reaching their maximum intensities further from the tropics, shifting toward the poles in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. These shifts can deliver hurricanes to areas -- including some heavily populated coastal regions -- that have not historically dealt with direct hits from storms and the devastating losses of life and property that can result.Another study, published in April by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, used a modeling approach to look at what would happen to hurricanes under future climate projections. Using real hurricane data from 2000-2013, the researchers found future hurricanes will experience a 9 percent slowdown, higher wind speeds, and produce 24 percent more rainfall."The rainfalls associated with the 'stall' of 2017's Hurricane Harvey in the Houston, Texas, area provided a dramatic example of the relationship between regional rainfall amounts and hurricane translation speeds," says Kossin. "In addition to other factors affecting hurricanes, like intensification and poleward migration, these slowdowns are likely to make future storms more dangerous and costly." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
May 31, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180531084249.htm | Study estimates increased death rate in Puerto Rico in months after Hurricane Maria | The mortality rate in Puerto Rico rose by 62% [95% confidence interval (CI) 11% to 114%] after Hurricane Maria, according to a new study led by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study was conducted in January and February 2018, in collaboration with colleagues from Carlos Albizu University in Puerto Rico and the University of Colorado School of Medicine. | The researchers concluded that the original estimate of 64 excess deaths due to Hurricane Maria is likely to be a substantial underestimate. The study estimates a death rate of 14.3 deaths per thousand [95% CI 9.8 to 18.9] between September 20 (date of Hurricane Maria) and December 31, 2017, up from a rate of 8.8 deaths per thousand at the same time in 2016. About one third of the reported deaths in the households surveyed in the study were attributed to delayed or prevented access to medical care.The study was published online May 29, 2018 in the Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, inflicting approximately $90 billion worth of damage and displacing thousands of residents. The storm disrupted medical services across the island, and many households were left for weeks without water, electricity, or cell phone coverage.As with any major natural disaster, assessing the loss of life caused by Hurricane Maria was difficult and contentious. For disaster-related deaths to be confirmed in Puerto Rico, bodies must be transported to San Juan or a medical examiner must travel to the region to verify the death. This makes it difficult to log deaths that were caused by delays in treatment or chronic conditions that worsened in the aftermath of the storm. In December 2017, media reports suggested that the official death toll was significantly underestimated.To produce an independent estimate of lives lost as a result of the storm, the researchers surveyed 3,299 randomly chosen households across Puerto Rico. Participants were asked about infrastructure damage, displacement, and deaths. Results from the survey showed that there were an estimated 14.3 deaths per 1,000 people between September 20 and December 31, 2017. By comparing this post-hurricane mortality rate with the same time period in 2016, the researchers estimated that there were 4,645 [95% CI, 793 to 8498] additional deaths in the three-month period following Hurricane Maria.In addition to a significantly higher death toll, the study showed that the average household went approximately 41 days without cell phone service, 68 days without water, and 84 days without electricity following the storm. More than 30% of surveyed households reported interruptions to medical care, with trouble accessing medications and powering respiratory equipment being the most frequently cited challenges.Household-based surveys such as these are well studied in the scientific literature and offer a cost-effective, rapid approach in the aftermath of a disaster. The researchers have made all of their anonymized data, analysis, and code publicly available for review.Support for the study came from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, Section of Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
May 21, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180521131532.htm | Hurricanes: Stronger, slower, wetter in the future? | Scientists have developed a detailed analysis of how 22 recent hurricanes would be different if they formed under the conditions predicted for the late 21st century. | While each storm's transformation would be unique, on balance, the hurricanes would become a little stronger, a little slower-moving, and a lot wetter.In one example, Hurricane Ike -- which killed more than 100 people and devastated parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2008 -- could have 13 percent stronger winds, move 17 percent slower, and be 34 percent wetter if it formed in a future, warmer climate.Other storms could become slightly weaker (for example, Hurricane Ernesto) or move slightly faster (such as Hurricane Gustav). None would become drier. The rainfall rate of simulated future storms would increase by an average of 24 percent.The study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and published in the "Our research suggests that future hurricanes could drop significantly more rain," said NCAR scientist Ethan Gutmann, who led the study. "Hurricane Harvey demonstrated last year just how dangerous that can be."Harvey produced more than 4 feet of rain in some locations, breaking records and causing devastating flooding across the Houston area.The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is NCAR's sponsor, and by DNV GL (Det Norske Veritas Germanischer Lloyd), a global quality assurance and risk management company."This study shows that the number of strong hurricanes, as a percent of total hurricanes each year, may increase," said Ed Bensman, a program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which supported the study. "With increasing development along coastlines, that has important implications for future storm damage."With more people and businesses relocating to coastal regions, the potential influence of environmental change on hurricanes has significant implications for public safety and the economy.Last year's hurricane season, which caused an estimated $215 billion in losses according to reinsurance company Munich RE, was the costliest on record.It's been challenging for scientists to study how hurricanes might change in the future as the climate continues to warm. Most climate models, which are usually run on a global scale over decades or centuries, are not run at a high enough resolution to "see" individual hurricanes.Most weather models, on the other hand, are run at a high enough resolution to accurately represent hurricanes, but because of the high cost of computational resources, they are not generally used to simulate long-term changes in climate.For the current study, the researchers took advantage of a massive new dataset created at NCAR. The scientists ran the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model at a high resolution (4 kilometers, or about 2.5 miles) over the contiguous United States over two 13-year periods.The simulations took about a year to run on the Yellowstone supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne.The first set of model runs simulates weather as it unfolded between 2000 and 2013, and the second simulates the same weather patterns but in a climate that's warmer by about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) -- the amount of warming that may be expected by the end of the century.Drawing on the vast amount of data, the scientists created an algorithm that enabled them to identify 22 named storms that appear with very similar tracks in the historic and future simulations, allowing the hurricanes to be more easily compared.As a group, storms in simulations of the future had 6 percent stronger average hourly maximum wind speeds than those in the past. They also moved at 9 percent slower speeds and had 24 percent higher average hourly maximum rainfall rates. Average storm radius did not change."Some past studies have also run the WRF at a high resolution to study the impact of climate change on hurricanes, but those studies have tended to look at a single storm, like Sandy or Katrina," Gutmann said."What we find in looking at more than 20 storms is that some change one way, while others change in a different way. There is so much variability that you can't study one storm and then extrapolate to all storms."But there was one consistent feature across storms: They all produced more rain.While the study sheds light on how a particular storm might look in a warmer climate, it doesn't provide insight into how environmental change might affect storm genesis. That's because the hurricanes analyzed in this study formed outside the region simulated by the WRF model and passed into the WRF simulation as fully formed storms.Other research has suggested that fewer storms may form in the future because of increasing atmospheric stability or greater high-level wind shear, though the storms that do form are apt to be stronger."It's possible that in a future climate, large-scale atmospheric changes wouldn't allow some of these storms to form," Gutmann said. "But from this study, we get an idea of what we can expect from the storms that do form." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
May 21, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180521131530.htm | Lightning in the eyewall of a hurricane beamed antimatter toward the ground | Hurricane Patricia, which battered the west coast of Mexico in 2015, was the most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Amid the extreme violence of the storm, scientists observed something new: a downward beam of positrons, the antimatter counterpart of electrons, creating a burst of powerful gamma-rays and x-rays. | Detected by an instrument aboard NOAA's Hurricane Hunter aircraft, which flew through the eyewall of the storm at its peak intensity, the positron beam was not a surprise to the UC Santa Cruz scientists who built the instrument. But it was the first time anyone has observed this phenomenon.According to David Smith, a professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, the positron beam was the downward component of an upward terrestrial gamma-ray flash that sent a short blast of radiation into space above the storm. Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) were first seen in 1994 by space-based gamma-ray detectors. They occur in conjunction with lightning and have now been observed thousands of times by orbiting satellites. A reverse positron beam was predicted by theoretical models of TGFs, but had never been detected."This is the first confirmation of that theoretical prediction, and it shows that TGFs are piercing the atmosphere from top to bottom with high-energy radiation," Smith said. "This event could have been detected from space, like almost all the other reported TGFs, as an upward beam caused by an avalanche of electrons. We saw it from below because of a beam of antimatter (positrons) sent in the opposite direction."One unexpected implication of the study, published May 17 in the "We detected it at an altitude of 2.5 kilometers, and I estimated our detectors could have seen it down to 1.5 kilometers. That's the altitude of Denver, so there are a lot of places where you could in theory see them if you had an instrument in the right place at the right time during a thunderstorm," Smith said.Despite the confirmation of the reverse positron beam, many questions remain unresolved about the mechanisms that drive TGFs. Strong electric fields in thunderstorms can accelerate electrons to near the speed of light, and these "relativistic" electrons emit gamma-rays when they scatter off of atoms in the atmosphere. The electrons can also knock other electrons off of atoms and accelerate them to high energies, creating an avalanche of relativistic electrons. A TGF, which is an extremely bright flash of gamma-rays, requires a large number of avalanches of relativistic electrons."It's an extraordinary event, and we still don't understand how it gets so bright," Smith said.The source of the positrons, however, is a well known phenomenon in physics called pair production, in which a gamma ray interacts with the nucleus of an atom to create an electron and a positron. Since they have opposite charges, they are accelerated in opposite directions by the electric field of the thunderstorm. The downward moving positrons produce x-rays and gamma-rays in their direction of travel when they collide with atomic nuclei, just like the upward moving electrons."What we saw in the aircraft are the gamma-rays produced by the downward positron beam," Smith said.First author Gregory Bowers, now at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and coauthor Nicole Kelley, now at Swift Navigation, were both graduate students at UC Santa Cruz when they worked together on the instrument that made the detection. The Airborne Detector for Energetic Lightning Emissions (ADELE) mark II was designed to observe TGFs up close by measuring x-rays and gamma-rays from aircraft flown into or above thunderstorms.Getting too close to a TGF could be hazardous, although the risk drops off rapidly with distance from the source. The gamma-ray dose at a distance of one kilometer would be negligible, Smith said. "It's hypothetically a risk, but the odds are quite small," he said. "I don't ask pilots to fly into thunderstorms, but if they're going anyway I'll put an instrument on board."Smith's group was the first to detect a TGF from an airplane using an earlier instrument, the ADELE mark I. In that case, the upward beam from the TGF was detected above a thunderstorm. For this study, the ADELE mark II flew aboard NOAA's Hurricane Hunter WP-3D Orion during the Atlantic hurricane season. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
May 12, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180512190537.htm | During disasters, active Twitter users likely to spread falsehoods | We know that Twitter is littered with misinformation. But how good are the social media platform's most active users at detecting these falsehoods, especially during public emergencies? | Not good, according to new University at Buffalo research that examined more than 20,000 tweets during Hurricane Sandy and the Boston Marathon bombing.The study, published today (May 11) in the journal Researchers examined three types of behavior. Twitter users could either spread the false news, seek to confirm it, or cast doubt upon it. Researchers found:"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate how apt Twitter users are at debunking falsehoods during disasters. Unfortunately, the results paint a less than flattering picture," says the study's lead author Jun Zhuang, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.Even after the false news had been debunked on Twitter and traditional news media outlets, the study found that:"These findings are important because they show how easily people are deceived during times when they are most vulnerable and the role social media platforms play in these deceptions," says Zhuang, who is conducting similar research concerning Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma.On a more positive note, the study found that while Twitter users are likely to spread false news during disasters, Twitter and other media platforms move quickly to correct the misinformation.Additionally, Zhuang says it's important to note that the study does not consider Twitter users who may have seen the original tweets with false news and decided to ignore them."It's possible that many people saw these tweets, decided they were inaccurate and chose not to engage," says Zhuang, who was recently awarded a $392,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to work on additional studies, including understanding what factors prompt Twitter users to ignore certain posts during emergencies, and the best ways to debunk false news. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
May 10, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180510133045.htm | Record-breaking ocean heat fueled Hurricane Harvey | In the weeks before Hurricane Harvey tore across the Gulf of Mexico and plowed into the Texas coast in August 2017, the Gulf's waters were warmer than any time on record, according to a new analysis led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). | These hotter-than-normal conditions supercharged the storm, fueling it with vast stores of moisture, the authors found. When it stalled near the Houston area, the resulting rains broke precipitation records and caused devastating flooding."We show, for the first time, that the volume of rain over land corresponds to the amount of water evaporated from the unusually warm ocean," said lead author Kevin Trenberth, an NCAR senior scientist. "As climate change continues to heat the oceans, we can expect more supercharged storms like Harvey."Despite a busy 2017 hurricane season, Hurricane Harvey was more or less isolated in location and time, traveling solo over relatively undisturbed waters in the Gulf of Mexico. This gave Trenberth and his colleagues an opportunity to study in detail how the storm fed off the heat stored in that 930-mile wide ocean basin.The team compared temperatures in the upper 160 meters (525 feet) of the Gulf before and after the storm using data collected by Argo, a network of autonomous floats that measure temperature as they move up and down in the water. To measure rainfall over land, the scientists took advantage of a new NASA-based international satellite mission, dubbed Global Precipitation Measurement.The study appears in the journal As hurricanes move over the ocean, their strong winds strafe the sea surface, making it easier for water to evaporate. The process of evaporation also requires energy from heat, and the warmer the temperatures are in the upper ocean and at the ocean surface, the more energy is available.As the storm progresses over the ocean, evaporating water as it goes, it leaves a cold wake in its path. In the case of Hurricane Harvey, the scientists found the cold wake was not very cold. So much heat was available in the upper layer of the ocean that, as the surface temperature was cooled from the storm, heat from below welled up, rewarming the surface waters and continuing to feed the storm.The near-surface ocean temperature before the storm's passage was upward of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), and after passage the temperature was still around 28.5 C (83 F). Sea surface temperatures above 26 C (79 F) are typically needed for a hurricane to continue to grow.Even after Harvey made landfall, its arms reached out over the ocean, continuing to draw strength (and water) from the still-warm Gulf."The implication is that the warmer oceans increased the risk of greater hurricane intensity and duration," Trenberth said. "While we often think of hurricanes as atmospheric phenomena, it's clear that the oceans play a critical role and will shape future storms as the climate changes."The scientists were able to measure the total loss in ocean heat, mostly due to evaporation, as the storm moved over the Gulf. They also measured the latent heat released over land as the water vapor turned back into liquid water and fell as rain. They then compared those two measurements and found that they corresponded.The study highlights the increased threat of future supercharged hurricanes due to climate change, Trenberth said."We know this threat exists, and yet in many cases, society is not adequately planning for these storms," Trenberth said. "I believe there is a need to increase resilience with better building codes, flood protection, and water management, and we need to prepare for contingencies, including planning evacuation routes and how to deal with power cuts." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
May 9, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180509081944.htm | Powerful hurricanes strengthen faster now than 30 years ago | Hurricanes that intensify rapidly -- a characteristic of almost all powerful hurricanes -- do so more strongly and quickly now than they did 30 years ago, according to a study published recently in | While many factors are at play, the chief driver is a natural phenomenon that affects the temperature of the waters in the Atlantic where hurricanes are powering up, according to scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.They found that a climate cycle known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO is central to the increasing intensification of hurricanes, broadly affecting conditions like sea temperature that are known to influence hurricanes.Last year's lineup of powerful storms -- Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria -spurred the scientists to take a close look at the rapid intensification process. This occurs when the maximum wind speed in a hurricane goes up by at least 25 knots (28.8 miles per hour) within a 24-hour period. It's a rite of passage for nearly all major hurricanes, including the big four of 2017.The team, comprised of Karthik Balaguru and Ruby Leung of PNNL and Greg Foltz of the NOAA, analyzed 30 years' worth of satellite hurricane data encompassing 1986 through 2015. Information came from NOAA's National Hurricane Center and the U.S. Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center.Consistent with other studies, the scientists did not find that rapid intensification is happening more often nowadays.But the scientists also looked closely at just how much the storms are strengthening. They found a sizeable jump in the strength of fast-growing storms -- the storms are getting more powerful more quickly within a 24-hour period than they were 30 years ago.The team found that the average boost in wind speed during a 24-hour intensification event is about 13 mph more than it was 30 years ago -- on average about 3.8 knots (4.3 mph) for each of the three decades studied.Several factors play a role when a hurricane gains more power rapidly, including the temperature of the surface of the ocean, humidity, characteristics of the clouds, the heat content in the ocean, and the direction of the wind at the surface compared to miles above. Among the biggest factors affecting the increase in magnitude in the last 30 years, according to the team's analysis:The team found that the biggest factor explaining the increasingly rapid intensification is the AMO. The result comes in part from analyses using 16 separate climate models to isolate the impact from global warming."This was a surprise, that the AMO seems to be a bigger influence in rapid intensification than other factors, including overall warming," said Balaguru, the first author of the paper.The AMO governs how the temperature of the waters in the North Atlantic cycles between warmer and cooler, with each period typically lasting a decade or more. The cycling occurs for reasons scientists don't completely understand, but it has broad effects on the environment. For example, it plays a big part in determining the heat content of the oceans, an important factor powering hurricanes.The AMO has generally been "positive" -- causing warmer waters -- since the late 1990s.Balaguru noted that while rapid intensification historically has occurred more often in the western Atlantic, that's not where the team found the increasing strength of the last 30 years. Rather, the phenomenon is strengthening more in the central and eastern Atlantic, especially to the east of the islands of the Lesser Antilles, which includes the Virgin Islands and Saint Kitts. That's the same area where the AMO creates warmer waters and boosts ocean heat content, in the central and eastern Atlantic.That's exactly the alley where hurricanes Irma, Jose and Maria powered up rapidly last year. It's a proving ground of sorts where many of the most powerful hurricanes strengthen dramatically.Balaguru notes that teasing out the effects of the AMO from broader effects of global warming was beyond the scope of the current study but is a focus for scientists.The work was supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Science. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
May 1, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180501085555.htm | La Niña-like ocean cooling patterns intensify northwestern Pacific tropical cyclones | The intensity and frequency of strong tropical cyclones, as well as cyclone landfalls, have increased in recent decades in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, raising speculation about the root cause of the surge in destructive Category 4 and 5 storms. | Now atmospheric researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa's International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) have published a study in Climate change has been marked by a persistent, if uneven, increase in global temperatures through time.Around the turn of the century, 1998-2012, the rate of temperature increase apparently slowed, and has since been labeled the Global Warming Hiatus. During this period, while the Indian and tropical north Atlantic Oceans warmed, the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean experienced La Niña-like cooling.La Niña is usually characterized by cooler sea surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific, pushing cyclone generation westward.IPRC researchers Yuqing Wang, Jiuwei Zhao and Ruifen Zhan found that, during the hiatus, dominant equatorial easterly winds caused cyclonic (counter-clockwise) circulation in the northwestern region of the Pacific Ocean, favoring the formation and intensification of cyclones there. These conditions also pushed more storms westward into the coastline of East Asia, generating increased landfall frequency of these intense storms.Interestingly, in the southeast region of the northwest Pacific, local atmospheric circulation was the opposite, anti-cyclonic (clockwise), inhibiting cyclone generation and intensification in that region.In conjunction with these wind patterns, IPRC researchers established a strong correlation between areas of warmer sea surface temperatures and intense cyclone occurrence in the northwest Pacific Ocean. This supports the conclusion that the higher frequency of greater intensity cyclones over the last few decades is closely tied to the atmospheric circulation patterns and sea surface temperature distribution induced by the hiatus."Most previous studies have suggested that, with general global warming, the numbers of tropical cyclones over the northwest Pacific will decrease. Instead, over the last couple decades, more tropical cyclones formed and intensified over the far northwest Pacific," explained Wang. "Our study shows this was due to increased local sea surface temperatures and reduced vertical wind shear associated with the hiatus conditions."Wang and his co-authors emphasize their results also underline the importance of acknowledging that there are swings between warmer and cooler phases due to natural climate variability, even within an overall warming climate. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
April 19, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180419100130.htm | Hurricane Harvey: Most fatalities occurred outside flood zones, Dutch-Texan research shows | A Dutch-Texan team found that most Houston-area drowning deaths from Hurricane Harvey occurred outside the zones designated by government as being at higher risk of flooding: the 100- and 500-year floodplains. Harvey, one of the costliest storms in US history, hit southeast Texas on 25 August 2017 causing unprecedented flooding and killing dozens. Researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Rice University in Texas published their results today in the European Geosciences Union journal | "It was surprising to me that so many fatalities occurred outside the flood zones," says Sebastiaan Jonkman, a professor at Delft's Hydraulic Engineering Department who led the new study.Drowning caused 80% of Harvey deaths, and the research showed that only 22% of fatalities in Houston's 4,600-square-kilometre district, Harris County, occurred within the 100-year floodplain, a mapped area that is used as the main indicator of flood risk in the US.Flood zones, or floodplains, are low-lying areas surrounding rivers and streams that are subject to flooding. To assess flood risk for insurance purposes and to set development standards, US authorities outline floodplains for 100- and 500-year floods. These events have a 1% probability (100-year flood) and a 0.2% probability (500-year) of occurring in any given year."Hurricane Harvey was much larger than a 100- or 500-year flood, so flooding outside of these boundaries was expected," says Jonkman. Rainfall totals in the week after the hurricane made landfall were among the highest recorded in US history, with over 1000 mm of rain falling in just three days in large parts of both Harris and surrounding counties. As a result, a report by Delft University found that "unprecedented flooding occurred over an area the size of the Netherlands."Nonetheless, it was surprising for the researchers to find that so many of Harvey's fatalities happened outside the designated floodplains given that these zones are expected to be "reasonable predictors of high-risk areas," according to Jonkman.The research began within days of the storm: "We wanted to identify lessons that could be learned, for both Texas and the Netherlands, from Harvey's impact and the local and government response to the flooding," says study co-author Antonia Sebastian, a postdoctoral research associate at Rice University's Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center, who was based at Delft University when Harvey struck.The team compiled a database of fatalities, using official government records and media sources, which they analysed in the The new study also shows that most fatalities -- over 80% -- were drownings, many occurring either in vehicles or when people were swept away while trying to get out of their cars. Six people died when their boat capsized during a rescue. The second largest causes of death were electrocution and lack of medical treatment, responsible for 6% of fatalities each.About 70% of those killed by Harvey were men. The team thinks the reason behind the high percentage of male fatalities could be that men tend to show more risk-taking behaviour, such as driving through flooded crossings or taking part in rescues.The researchers hope their findings encourage authorities to identify high risk areas outside of the designated floodplains and to take preventive measures to reduce the number of victims in future floods, including closing low water crossings and underpasses during extreme flood events.Jonkman says that the current flood maps will need to be improved, but that floodplains should not be abandoned as an indicator of high-risk areas. "Better communication of their purpose and limitations would help reduce risk." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
April 4, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180404143415.htm | Unprecedented psychological distress months after Hurricane Harvey | Four months after Hurricane Harvey soaked the Houston area and displaced more than a third of the population, an alarming 52 percent of Harris County residents said they were still struggling to recover, according to a new report from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health. | "What we found was that even though recovery around us looks to be moving at a quick pace, a fairly high percentage of people are still looking for alternative housing or have substantial unmet needs," said Stephen Linder, Ph.D., co-author of the report and director of the Institute for Health Policy at UTHealth School of Public Health.This survey, conducted four months after Harvey, provides more detail on how the storm affected people mentally and physically and reports unprecedented levels of serious psychological distress (SPD) among those directly affected by hurricane damage. While 18 percent of Harris County residents showed signs of SPD in the period since the storm (the national rate is 4 percent), among those who had serious damage to their vehicle, the number rose to 37 percent, and among those who had serious damage to their home, it peaked at 48 percent. By comparison, the Health of Houston Survey in 2010 found that only 8 percent of Harris County residents met the scientific criteria for SPD.Among the residents who suffered serious damage and reported signs of psychological distress, only 30 percent considered mental health care a pressing need."The reason for this could be two-fold. First, not all people who experience signs of SPD recognize it as a problem that needs addressing. Second, even when getting mental health care is recognized as a need, in terms of priorities, something else might take precedent, such as repairing a home, replacing a car or applying for disaster assistance," said Dritana Marko, M.D., co-author of the report and faculty associate in the Institute for Health Policy at UTHealth School of Public Health in San Antonio.The research team, also responsible for the Health of Houston survey, the largest population health survey in the area, found that the storm also took a serious toll on people's physical health. Almost 22 percent experienced a worsening of an existing health condition, a physical injury or some new illness during or right after the time of the hurricane. Among residents who reported physical injury or illness: 39 percent reported physical injuries, 26 percent contracted infections, 22 percent suffered respiratory problems and 10 percent had worsening of existing chronic health conditions. Lesser conditions included allergies affecting 5 percent and depression/anxiety, headaches and skin rashes, each affecting 3 percent.However, in the face of physical and emotional adversity, Harris County residents also showed remarkable levels of generosity and perseverance. Of those who evacuated and have yet to return to their homes, 36 percent are still staying with friends or family. Household pets were also welcome as 90 percent of evacuees who had pets were able to bring them.Harris County residents came out in force to help their neighbors. Nearly 60 percent of people donated money, clothing and food; 41 percent gave their time and 29 percent provided housing for friends and neighbors affected by the storm."Our conversation about the aftermath of the storm has concentrated on changing the physical environment to mitigate future flooding. Nevertheless, our data suggest that there are less visible, psychological effects that are lasting and, for those with damaged homes, exceed what we saw after other natural disasters. These effects need to be a part of our recovery conversation as well," added Linder, who is also associate director of the Health Policy Institute at the Texas Medical Center.The report, sponsored by UTHealth and compiled by the Institute for Health Policy at the School of Public Health, drew data from a mobile device survey of 500 Harris County residents, ages 18 to 54, in late December 2017 and early January 2018."Mobile device surveys of this kind are frequently used in marketing research because of their timeliness but haven't been used extensively for post-disaster assessments. Our project is one of the first to use this approach since it offers a very efficient method to gather information quickly and in a cost-effective way," said Linder.More in-depth data will be included in the next Health of Houston survey report, due out later this year, which will allow researchers to compare indicators pre- and post-disaster, as well as measure recovery eight months after Harvey. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
April 4, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180404114800.htm | Hawaiian-language newspapers illuminate an 1871 hurricane | A major hurricane struck the islands of Hawai'i and Maui on August 9, 1871 and wrought widespread destruction from Hilo to Lahaina. A recent study by two scientists, a Hawaiian language expert, and an educator from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UH Manoa) revealed how historical Hawaiian-language newspapers expand knowledge of this and other natural disasters of the past. The storm of 1871 was known from ship logs and English newspaper accounts, but the Hawaiian-language newspapers added significant new information allowing the team to document the intensity and track of the storm for the first time. | Following the introduction of the English language by missionaries and the collaborative effort with literate Hawaiians to create Hawaiian orthography, literacy rates in Hawai'i rose from near zero in 1820 to between 90% and 95% by midcentury. King Kamehameha III's call for national literacy was strongly advocated by the ali'i (royalty), and by 1831, the royal government financed all infrastructure costs for 1,103 schoolhouses -- and a teachers' college, the first such school west of the Rocky Mountains.From 1834 to 1948 more than a hundred independent newspapers were printed in Hawaiian. This newspaper archive comprises more than a million typescript pages of text -- the largest native-language cache in the Western Hemisphere. Newspapers became an intentional repository of knowledge, opinion, and historical progress as Hawai'i moved through kingdom, constitutional monarchy, republic, and territory.A team led by Puakea Nogelmeier, professor of Hawaiian Language at UH Manoa, director of the UH Institute of Hawaiian Language Research and Translation (IHLRT) and co-author of this study, has worked for years to convert Hawaiian-language newspapers to a word-searchable digital format that is publicly available. The IHLRT is associated with the University of Hawai'i Sea Grant College Program's Center for Integrated Science, Knowledge, and Culture, one of six centers of excellence administered by Hawai'i Sea Grant.Recognizing the value of Hawaiian newspapers as sources of data for the day-to-day events of the past, Steven Businger and Thomas Schroeder, professors in the UH Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), partnered with Nogelmeier and his graduate students to extend translation research in the Hawaiian language papers, looking specifically for geophysical stories, including the hurricane of 1871. They produced a digital database of more than 4,000 articles related to meteorology and geology.What they found in the translations was a timeline of the 1871 storm hitting -- Waipi'o, then Kohala, then on to Maui -- and detailed descriptions about the resulting destruction. One account relays "there were 28 houses blown clean away and many more partially destroyed. There is hardly a tree or bush of any kind standing in the valley." Another mentions "the wooden houses of the residents here in Hawai'i were knocked down."The existence of such a powerful hurricane, uncovered in the historical record, more clearly defines the hurricane risk faced by the people of Hawai'i today."Puakea's vision has helped conserve Hawaiian language of the past and is opening a window on the historical record that has been long overlooked in Hawai'i," said Businger, lead author of the study and professor of Atmospheric Sciences in SOEST.Businger and JIMAR continued to support the effort to search Hawaiian-language newspapers for articles relating to floods, droughts, high surf, storms, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions."The goal of the ongoing work is to extend our understanding of geoscience back into historical, post-contact, and pre-contact times to project and prepare for future events," said Businger. "It is important to note that there would be much greater destruction if a storm of similar intensity and track were to occur today."The translated articles are also being used in place- and culture-based geoscience education and curriculum development."These translations are important for STEM education because the articles show that universal public education during the Hawaiian Kingdom led to highly-literate citizens, always observing, commenting, communicating, and sharing information that others were free to comment on," said Pauline Chinn, professor in the UH Manoa College of Education (COE) and co-author of the study. "These are the fundamental processes of science inquiry -- sharing of data and interpretations in a public forum for commentary and critique."With support from NSF, Businger, Nogelmeier, and Chinn searched 1870-1900 Hawaiian-language newspapers for articles relating to floods, droughts, and storms, enabling detection of El-Nino-La Nina patterns. Chinn, Nogelmeier, Kahea Faria, assistant specialist in COE, and four graduate students continue expanding the IHLRT database of articles on 'aina-based phenomena, specifically to create a resource for teachers and public."Incorporating articles into place-based K-12 STEM lessons provides students with historical knowledge of ecological, cultural, and economic changes as Hawai'i entered the global economy," said Chinn. We find students, especially those identifying as Native Hawaiian are more interested in future courses and careers related to STEM, Hawaiian language and culture after these lessons. "We are hopeful that knowing the past can help us to understand where we are now and provide pathways for the future." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
April 3, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180403111123.htm | Coral reefs protect coasts from severe storms | Coral reefs can naturally protect coasts from tropical cyclones by reducing the impact of large waves before they reach the shore, according to scientists. | Tropical cyclones wreak havoc on coastal infrastructure, marine habitats and coastal populations across the world. However, Dr. Michael Cuttler, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at The University of Western Australia (UWA), says that for coastlines facing a direct cyclone impact, a fringing reef can protect the beach from extensive erosion."Reefs can effectively protect shorelines because of their ability to cause waves to break offshore, thus limiting the energy impacting the coastline," he said.Dr. Cuttler and several of his Coral CoE colleagues studied Ningaloo Reef -- Australia's largest fringing reef system, and a UN World Heritage site -- during Tropical Cyclone Olwyn in 2015. Olwyn was a Category 3 severe tropical cyclone that caused extensive damage along the coast of Western Australia.The team observed that the shoreline remained largely unscathed because of the protection provided by its offshore reef."The large waves generated by the cyclone were effectively dissipated by the reef situated offshore," Dr. Cuttler explained."The little erosion that did occur was due to smaller waves that were generated by wind within the lagoon."The shape, or geomorphology, of the reef -- with its steep forereef slope, shallow reef crest and reef flat, and relatively shallow lagoon -- is representative of most fringing reefs worldwide."In this study, we also compared similar cyclone impacts on coastlines without reefs and found that these beaches were eroded up to ten times more than the beach at Ningaloo," Dr. Cuttler said.While the findings of Dr. Cuttler's study indicated that coral reefs can effectively protect coastlines from tropical cyclones and other large wave impacts, it also suggested that for reef systems with lagoons, local wind effects cannot be ignored when attempting to model or predict the impact of cyclones.He also warned that the ability of reefs to protect adjacent coastlines was threatened by both sea level rise and slowing rates of reef accretion."These changes may ultimately increase the amount of wave energy reaching the coastline and potentially enhance coastal erosion," he said.Few studies before have measured the hydrodynamic conditions and morphological responses of such a coastline in the presence of a tropical cyclone.Dr. Cuttler and his Coral CoE colleagues found the results could be used to assess coastal hazards facing reef-fringed coastlines due to extreme tropical cyclone conditions, and would become increasingly relevant as climate change alters the status of coral reefs globally. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
April 2, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180402160748.htm | Proper data analysis might be among Hurricane Maria's casualties | The ability to use statistics to guide decision-making may be collateral damage of Hurricane Maria's devastating blow to Puerto Rico, according to a Penn State demographer. | In an article published today (April 2) in "There are a lot of things that can go wrong if you aren't carefully gathering and analyzing data, particularly in your ability to convey the devastation of, in this case, an environmental disaster," said Santos. "One of the main concerns I have is that if you minimize the impact that this disaster has had in Puerto Rico, you are going to lose the attention of people who are in decision-making roles about the allocation of resources."Those resources include money, but also other forms of help, such as the allocation of first responders, electrical technicians and food aid, he said. This inability to properly allocate resources may also be behind Puerto Rico's sluggish recovery from the disaster."It's been more than six months after the hurricane and there are still people without energy on the island," said Santos. "And that's unheard of for any jurisdiction. Usually after a disaster, things are fixed in two or three months, at the latest."He added that Puerto Rico's status as a territory, not a state, makes the ability of statistics to draw attention to concerns even more important."Statistics are the only real voice Puerto Ricans have," said Santos, who is also an assistant teaching professor in sociology and criminology. "They don't have votes. They can't vote for a member of Congress, or the president of the United States. Their political power is diminished, so the only way you can create an effective strategy is to use data as your main tool for discussion."He added that he is particularly concerned with the increased scrutiny of the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics and what that might mean for future data gathering and analysis on the island."If we do not accept what our data are telling us, we will not be able to address the problems," he said. "Any local government that wants to address the needs of its people should listen to people who are doing data analysis and to allow the data to speak for itself."Santos said that in a recent study, he and his colleagues estimated the death toll to be around 1,085, far higher than the 64 lives lost initially listed in government statistics. The government has since re-adjusted its tally to about 1,000, according to Santos.The researchers arrived at their numbers by analyzing excess deaths on the island to more accurately quantify fatalities caused -- directly and indirectly -- by Hurricane Maria. They found, for example, that the death rate from September to October was 27 percent higher in 2017 compared to previous years.Most of the excess deaths were concentrated among older age groups, according to the researchers. Excess deaths in nursing homes were 45 percent higher in 2017 compared to 2016. The researchers also found a 41 percent increase in excess deaths at emergency departments. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
March 26, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180326213310.htm | Are fire ants worse this spring because of Hurricane Harvey? | Rice University ecologists are checking to see if Hurricane Harvey's unprecedented floods gave a competitive boost to fire ants and crazy ants, two of southeast Texas' least favorite uninvited guests. | Extreme weather events like Harvey are expected to become more likely as Earth's climate changes due to greenhouse gas emissions, and scientists don't understand how extreme weather will impact invasive pests, pollinators and other species that affect human well-being.With support from the National Science Foundation's Rapid Response Research (RAPID) program, Rice ecologists Tom Miller, Sarah Bengston and Scott Solomon, along with their students, are evaluating whether Harvey increased opportunities for invasion by exotic ants."Hurricane Harvey was, among other things, a grand ecological experiment," said Miller, the principal investigator on the grant and the Godwin Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Rice's Department of BioSciences. "It offers a unique opportunity to explore whether a single extreme-weather event can re-shuffle an entire community of organisms.""We're conducting monthly pitfall sampling at 19 established sites in the Big Thicket, a national preserve near Beaumont," said Bengston, an ant expert, co-principal investigator on grant and Huxley Research Instructor of BioSciences. "Rice's team has been working at these same sites for three years, and we know fire ants and tawny crazy ants, which are each invasive species, had begun to penetrate the intact native ecosystems in the park before the hurricane. We now want to know whether Harvey accelerated this invasion process."The RAPID funding will allow the team to document changes in ant communities and test whether changes in response to the hurricane are transient or represent new stable states.Miller said the researchers also plan to assemble a functional trait database for the ant communities to test whether the Harvey floodwaters favored some types of ant species -- such as those with larger bodies or more-protected nests -- over others."There are dozens of native ant species in the preserve that provide valuable ecosystem services like decomposition and pest control," said Solomon, an ant expert, co-principal investigator on the grant and associate teaching professor of biosciences. "Fire ants and crazy ants, which are each native to South America, are noxious invasive pests that tend to overwhelm and drive out almost all native ant species. If the floods cleaned the slate by drowning all the native ant colonies in the area, our hypothesis is that this may provide a competitive advantage to invaders."Solomon said research teams began making monthly visits to the Big Thicket test sites just a few weeks after Harvey and will continue collecting samples for one year."It was a cold winter, and there wasn't much ant activity," he said. "As temperatures warm up, we'll be interested to see which ants come back the soonest and in what numbers."NSF's RAPID grants support research of natural disasters and unanticipated events for which time is a factor in gathering data. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
March 19, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180319091035.htm | Preventing hurricanes using air bubbles | Many people have tried to find ways of preventing hurricanes before they make landfall, resulting in the loss of human lives. Norwegian researchers believe that the answer lies in cold bubbles. | In recent years we have witnessed intense tropical storms that have taken many thousands of human lives and caused massive destruction. For example in 2005, hurricane Katrina killed more than 2,000 people and caused damage worth about NOK 800 billion. In 2016, hurricane Matthew swept across Haiti, taking 852 human lives and destroying many towns on the island.Tropical hurricanes are generated when masses of cold and warm air collide. Another essential factor is that the sea surface temperature must be greater than 26.5°C.“Climate change is causing sea surface temperatures to increase,” says Grim Eidnes, who is a Senior Research Scientist at SINTEF Ocean. “The critical temperature threshold at which evaporation is sufficient to promote the development of hurricanes is 26.5°C. In the case of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in the period August to September 2017, sea surface temperatures were measured at 32°C”, he says.So to the big question. Is it possible to cool the sea surface to below 26.5°C by exploiting colder water from deeper in the water column?Many have tried to address this problem in the past.People have suggested towing icebergs to the Gulf of Mexico from the Arctic. Others have proposed seeding clouds with sea salt in order to make them whiter, thus increasing their reflectivity and so reducing sea surface temperatures. Attempts have been made to use aircraft to release dry ice in the vicinity of hurricanes with the aim of increasing precipitation as a means of dissipating energy.“However, none of these ideas or suggestions have been great success stories”, says Eidnes.Researchers at SINTEF now intend to save lives by using a tried and tested method called a “bubble curtain”.The method consists of supplying bubbles of compressed air from a perforated pipe lowered in the water, which then rise, taking with them colder water from deeper in the ocean. At the surface, the cold water mixes with, and cools, the warm surface water.SINTEF believes that the Yucatan Strait will be an ideal test arena for this technology.“Our initial investigations show that the pipes must be located at between 100 and 150 metres depth in order to extract water that is cold enough” says Eidnes. “By bringing this water to the surface using the bubble curtains, the surface temperature will fall to below 26.5°C, thus cutting off the hurricane’s energy supply”, he says, before adding that “This method will allow us quite simply to prevent hurricanes from achieving life-threatening intensities”.Norway has been using bubble curtains for many years, and researchers at SINTEF believe that these can also be used to prevent hurricanes.“For example, we use them for keeping our fjords free of ice”, says Eidnes. “During Norwegian winters, sea surface water is colder than at depth, so by lifting warmer water to the surface using bubble curtains, we can prevent the fjords from icing up”, he says.It was Olav Hollingsæter, founder of the company OceanTherm AS, who came up with the idea of cooling ocean surface waters as a means of preventing hurricanes.“It all began in 2005 when hurricane Katrina swept over New Orleans, taking with it many thousands of human lives”, says Hollingsæter. “The hurricane’s strength was the result of high seawater temperatures, and my first thought was that we should be able to do something about this”, he says. He then contacted researchers at SINTEF, who had previously been working with curtains as a means of restricting the spread of oil spills. SINTEF supported his idea, so the project is now under way.“Our system represents no obstruction to shipping and can be implemented at both small and large scales. We can deploy bubble curtains based on oil production platforms”, he says. One area that researchers argue will be suitable for this system is the Gulf of Mexico, which is host to more than 4,000 platforms.“It’s also possible to deploy large-scale systems, for example by installing pipes across the entire Yucatan Strait, or extending them from the mainland along the coast. There is no shortage of possibilities”, says Eidnes. (View the map).The US is regularly hit by hurricanes. However, there are also areas in Asia that are affected by fatal hurricanes with the power to devastate large island communities.“The cost-benefit potential of the SINTEF project is very great”, says Hollingsæter. “The most intense hurricanes cause communities major material damage and, in some cases, many lives are lost. This project is both meaningful and important. I hope and believe that we will succeed”, he says.Last spring the project was granted funding from Innovation Norway in order to carry out preliminary studies. Hollingsæter now hopes and believes that these studies can be continued with funding from the Research Council of Norway. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
March 16, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180316153856.htm | Tree care workers need better training to handle dangers on the job | As climate change increases the risk to trees from severe storms, insects, diseases, drought and fire, a Rutgers University study highlights the need for improved safety in tree-care operations. | According to findings published in the Tree care workers have one of the most dangerous jobs in America, regularly encountering heights, slippery conditions, falling limbs, sharp equipment and electrical wires. The incidence of injuries increases after storms when unqualified "storm-chasers" with chainsaws and landscaping companies offer their services to uninformed homeowners. Some municipalities also struggle to handle tree damage with inadequately trained labor and old equipment. Annually, tree care injuries account for about 80 worker deaths and at least 23,000 chainsaw injuries treated in emergency departments. Many of those injuries result from inadequate training and equipment."There is a popular misconception that tree removal is low-skill work, but nothing could be further from the truth," said Michele Ochsner, formerly with Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. "Handling storm-downed trees without injury to people or property involves an array of technical skills and knowledge of how different species of trees respond in different seasons and weather conditions."Since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Ochsner, along with Elizabeth Marshall, an environmental and occupational epidemiologist at Rutgers School of Public Health, and Daniel Lefkowitz at the New Jersey Department of Health, have been analyzing surveillance data after storms to assess injury risks related to tree work. They also conducted interviews with private and municipal tree care experts to understand the Sandy experience and suggest ways to improve safety.Storms and the ensuing long hours exacerbate the job's significant risks. "Tree care crews handle thousands of downed trees in the wake of a hurricane or even the recent snow storm. It takes knowledge, proper equipment and coordination to do that safely," Marshall said.Although there is no current Occupational Safety and Health Administration standard for tree trimming, employers are required to comply with all general industry standards set by a network of national, regional and state associations, said Marshall. She noted that New Jersey recently passed a comprehensive licensing law to assist consumers in hiring a tree care company that upholds the state's standards."Our interviews with tree care workers revealed a number of recommendations to plan ahead for major storms," said Marshall. "For example, companies and municipalities should ensure equipment is well maintained, employees are properly trained in their native language and provided with personal protective equipment. Consumers should work with a licensed tree care professional to identify damaged or improperly planted trees and remove dead trees and limbs before the next big storm. Then, they will be ready when bad weather arrives and trees come down." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
March 15, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180315110626.htm | Half a degree more global warming could flood out 5 million more people | The 2015 Paris climate agreement sought to stabilize global temperatures by limiting warming to well below 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue limiting warming even further, to 1.5 C. | To quantify what that would mean for people living in coastal areas, a group of researchers employed a global network of tide gauges and a local sea level projection framework to explore differences in the frequency of storm surges and other extreme sea-level events across three scenarios: global temperature increases of 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5 C.They concluded that by 2150, the seemingly small difference between an increase of 1.5 and 2.0 C would mean the permanent inundation of lands currently home to about 5 million people, including 60,000 who live on small island nations.The study, conducted by researchers at Princeton University and colleagues at Rutgers and Tufts Universities, the independent scientific organization Climate Central, and ICF International, was published in the journal "People think the Paris Agreement is going to save us from harm from climate change, but we show that even under the best-case climate policy being considered today, many places will still have to deal with rising seas and more frequent coastal floods," said DJ Rasmussen, a graduate student in Princeton's Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and first author of the study.The researchers found that higher temperatures will make extreme sea level events much more common. They used long-term hourly tide gauge records and extreme value theory to estimate present and future return periods of extreme sea-level events through the 22nd century. Under the 1.5 C scenario, the frequency of extreme sea level events is still expected to increase. For example, by the end of the 21st century, New York City is expected to experience one Hurricane Sandy-like flood event every five years.Extreme sea levels can arise from high tides or storm surge or a combination of surge and tide (sometimes called the storm tide). When driven by hurricanes or other large storms, extreme sea levels flood coastal areas, threatening life and property. Rising mean sea levels are already magnifying the frequency and severity of extreme sea levels, and experts predict that by the end of the century, coastal flooding may be among the costliest impacts of climate change in some regions.Future extreme events will be exacerbated by the rising global sea level, which in turn depends on the trajectory of global mean surface temperature. Even if global temperatures are stabilized, sea levels are expected to continue to rise for centuries, due to the fact that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the ice sheets are slow to respond to warming.Overall, the researchers predicted that by the end of the century, a 1.5 C temperature increase could drive the global mean sea level up by roughly 1.6 feet (48 cm) while a 2.0 C increase will raise oceans by about 1.8 feet (56 cm) and a 2.5 C increase will raise sea level by an estimated 1.9 feet (58 cm). | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
March 6, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180306115755.htm | Sea level rise urgently requires new forms of decision making | US cities facing sea level rise need to look beyond traditional strategies for managing issues such as critical erosion and coastal squeeze, according to new research from Lund University. Civil society initiatives must now play a crucial role in adapting society to climate change, the study argues. | Using the City of Flagler Beach in Florida as a case study, researcher Chad Boda illustrates that the traditional options put forward to address erosion and sea level rise affecting the city's beach and coastal infrastructure either take a market-driven approach which fails to take into account many environmental and social considerations, or are currently too politically contentious to implement.The three options that have been considered in Flagler Beach are: constructing a sea wall, beach re-nourishment, or relocation of coastal infrastructure.The sea wall option, long promoted by the Florida Department of Transportation, would protect vulnerable coastal infrastructure but would damage the local beach environment, which is central to the city's tourism economy. The sea wall would also affect the nesting habitat of federally protected endangered sea turtles, the study shows.The beach re-nourishment option, meanwhile, proposed by the federal agency United States Army Corps of Engineers, has the potential to provide incidental environmental benefits, but is primarily concerned with maximizing return on investment. This option was later abandoned after Hurricane Matthew, that struck in October 2016, wrought such extensive damage to the coastal environment that it was deemed no longer economically justified to proceed with the project."Both of these options are ultimately based on a cost-benefit analysis, where return on investment takes precedence over environmental concerns such as maintaining the beach and the dunes. The aborted re-nourishment project makes this very clear. The hurricane has basically made it too costly to go ahead, even though re-nourishment would provide for more social and economic benefits than a seawall," says Chad Boda.The study instead proposes, that from a scientific, environmental and societal perspective, it is the option of relocating coastal infrastructure that would likely provide the most benefit to the city in the long-run, as it would protect both the beach and vulnerable infrastructure. Relocation has been promoted as the only viable long-term sustainable approach to beach management by coastal scientists; since it would provide for the beach to naturally adapt to sea level rise. Implementing this solution, however, is not likely to be an easy task."That option is currently too politically controversial as the local community was concerned that local businesses could lose customers, that it would cause more traffic jams in the city, and that it would ultimately reduce property value," says Chad Boda.The study highlights that this course of events has left Flagler Beach with effectively only one option on the table: some form of sea wall, since re-nourishment was deemed too expensive to implement, and the city's residents and politicians are currently unwilling to relocate coastal infrastructure."Yet this option, since it incorporates no procedure for adapting to sea level rise, will only lead to ever-increasing cost of erosion control, and the eventual loss of all sandy beaches along developed shorelines," explains Chad Boda.According to Boda, this indicates that Flagler Beach, along with many other American cities unable to afford ever more expensive re-nourishment projects, has effectively reached the limit of what actions it is able to take in terms of addressing erosion and sea level rise. The city is now effectively back where it started, holding the line against erosion with expensive and environmentally problematic temporary projects, with no clear plan for how to address future erosion caused by storms or to make the tough decisions needed to adapt to climate change. The continued degradation of the local environment will likely pose a major problem for the city's tourism economy and tax base in the coming years, particularly as sea level rise continues.The study argues that a new decision-making model -- a social choice model -- could be one way forward. By taking primarily economic criteria into account, a wide variety of other concerns citizens have, including those of far-away tax payers and future generations, are left out. Therefore additional criteria, whether environmental, cultural, or recreational, should be identified through reasonable public discussion.This would require not only more effective collaboration between federal, state and local governments, but also the ceding of more decision-making power to citizens and civil society organizations."By using a social choice model, the city would have a richer source of options and ideas to work with. Something that puts all available options on the table and requires that they be evaluated with a more comprehensive and long-term perspective."Because social choice involves changing the way decisions of public concern are currently made, it is not likely to be justified by current government or economic calculations, according to Boda. This means civil society initiatives would need to provide the primary mechanism for achieving the needed change in practice."There are many cases in US history where civil society has played a crucial role in bringing about change. These institutions could be the drivers for new ways of collective decision making since we can no longer rely only on the market or formal government to offer solutions that will protect both our environment and our society in the face of rising seas and a changing climate," Chad Boda concludes. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
February 15, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180215131145.htm | Geophysicists and atmospheric scientists partner to track typhoons' seismic footprints | Climatologists are often asked, "Is climate change making hurricanes stronger?" but they can't give a definitive answer because the global hurricane record only goes back to the dawn of the satellite era. But now, an intersection of disciplines -- seismology, atmospheric sciences, and oceanography -- offers an untapped data source: the continuous seismic record, which dates back to the early 20th century. | An international team of researchers has found a new way to identify the movement and intensity of hurricanes, typhoons and other tropical cyclones by tracking the way they shake the seafloor, as recorded on seismometers on islands and near the coast. After looking at 13 years of data from the northwest Pacific Ocean, they have found statistically significant correlations between seismic data and storms. Their work was published Feb. 15 in the journal The group of experts was assembled by Princeton University's Lucia Gualtieri, a postdoctoral research associate in geosciences, and Salvatore Pascale, an associate research scholar in atmospheric and oceanic sciences.Most people associate seismology with earthquakes, said Gualtieri, but the vast majority of the seismic record shows low-intensity movements from a different source: the oceans. "A seismogram is basically the movement of the ground. It records earthquakes, because an earthquake makes the ground shake. But it also records all the tiny other movements," from passing trains to hurricanes. "Typhoons show up very well in the record," she said.Because there is no way to know when an earthquake will hit, seismometers run constantly, always poised to record an earthquake's dramatic arrival. In between these earth-shaking events, they track the background rumbling of the planet. Until about 20 years ago, geophysicists dismissed this low-intensity rumbling as noise, Gualtieri said."What is noise? Noise is a signal we don't understand," said Pascale, who is also an associate research scientist at the National and Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.Just as astronomers have discovered that the static between radio stations gives us information about the cosmic background, seismologists have discovered that the low-level "noise" recorded by seismograms is the signature of wind-driven ocean storms, the cumulative effect of waves crashing on beaches all over the planet or colliding with each other in the open sea.One ocean wave acting alone is not strong enough to generate a seismic signature at the frequencies she was examining, explained Gualtieri, because typical ocean waves only affect the upper few feet of the sea. "The particle motion decays exponentially with depth, so at the seafloor you don't see anything," she said. "The main mechanism to generate seismic abnormalities from a typhoon is to have two ocean waves interacting with each other." When two waves collide, they generate vertical pressure that can reach the seafloor and jiggle a nearby seismometer.When a storm is large enough -- and storms classified as hurricanes or typhoons are -- it will leave a seismic record lasting several days. Previous researchers have successfully traced individual large storms on a seismogram, but Gualtieri came at the question from the opposite side: can a seismogram find any large storm in the area?Gualtieri and her colleagues found a statistically significant agreement between the occurrence of tropical cyclones and large-amplitude, long-lasting seismic signals with short periods, between three and seven seconds, called "secondary microseisms." They were also able to calculate the typhoons' strength from these "secondary microseisms," or tiny fluctuations, which they successfully correlated to the observed intensity of the storms.In short, the seismic record had enough data to identify when typhoons happened and how strong they were.So far, the researchers have focused on the ocean off the coast of Asia because of its powerful typhoons and good network of seismic stations. Their next steps include refining their method and examining other storm basins, starting with the Caribbean and the East Pacific.And then they will tackle the historic seismic record: "When we have a very defined method and have applied this method to all these other regions, we want to start to go back in time," said Gualtieri.While global storm information goes back only to the early days of the satellite era, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first modern seismograms were created in the 1880s. Unfortunately, the oldest records exist only on paper, and few historical records have been digitized."If all this data can be made available, we could have records going back more than a century, and then we could try to see any trend or change in intensity of tropical cyclones over a century or more," said Pascale. "It's very difficult to establish trends in the intensity of tropical cyclones -- to see the impact of global warming. Models and theories suggest that they should become more intense, but it's important to find observational evidence.""This new technique, if it can be shown to be valid across all tropical-cyclone prone basins, effectively lengthens the satellite era," said Morgan O'Neill, a T.C. Chamberlin Postdoctoral Fellow in geosciences at the University of Chicago who was not involved in this research. "It extends the period of time over which we have global coverage of tropical cyclone occurrence and intensity," she said.The researchers' ability to correlate seismic data with storm intensity is vital, said Allison Wing, an assistant professor of earth, ocean and atmospheric science at Florida State University, who was not involved in this research. "When it comes to understanding tropical cyclones -- what controls their variability and their response to climate and climate change -- having more data is better, in particular data that can tell us about intensity, which their method seems to do. ... It helps us constrain the range of variability that hurricane intensity can have."This connection between storms and seismicity began when Gualtieri decided to play with hurricane data in her free time, she said. But when she superimposed the hurricane data over the seismic data, she knew she was on to something. "I said, 'Wow, there's something more than just play. Let's contact someone who can help."Her research team ultimately grew to include a second seismologist, two atmospheric scientists and a statistician. "The most challenging part was establishing communications with scientists coming from different backgrounds," said Pascale. "Often, in different fields in science, we speak different dialects, different scientific dialects."Once they developed a "shared dialect," he said, they began to make exciting discoveries."This is how science evolves," said Pascale. "Historically, it's always been like that. Disciplines first evolve within their own kingdom, then a new field is born."The article, "The persistent signature of tropical cyclones in ambient seismic noise" by Lucia Gualtieri, Suzana Camargo, Salvatore Pascale, Flavio Pons and Göran Ekström, was published Feb. 15 in the journal | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
February 15, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180215125016.htm | Hurricanes Irma and Maria temporarily altered choruses of land and sea animals | Audio recordings of Hurricanes Irma and Maria's passage over Puerto Rico document how the calls of coastal critters changed in response to the deadly storms. The hurricanes caused a major disruption in the acoustic activity of snapping shrimp, a reduction in insect and bird sounds, and potentially an intensification of fish choruses, according to new research presented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting Friday. | In March 2017, researchers set up acoustic monitoring sites in coastal forests and coral reefs on Puerto Rico's southwest coast to continuously record the area's ambient sounds. Their goal was to capture the region's land and sea soundscapes -- especially the cacophony of sounds created by animal vocalizations -- and document how and why they change over time.But the passage of Hurricanes Irma and Maria over Puerto Rico in September gave the researchers an unexpected look at how coastal soundscapes change in response to natural disasters. Although the hurricanes did not directly hit the study area, audio recordings reveal the storms had noticeable short-term effects on fish choruses, snapping shrimp activity in coral reefs, and bird and insect calls on land.The recordings show fish increased the intensity of their nightly choruses in the days following Hurricane Irma. The clicking of snapping shrimp, which are among the loudest animal noises in the ocean, plummeted during Hurricane Maria, and the daily snapping rhythm was disrupted for several days.In nearby dry forests, Maria had longer-lasting effects on the soundscape. There was a marked reduction in insect sounds during the three weeks after the storm. Listen to time-lapse recordings of changes to insect sounds, fish choruses and snapping shrimp activity here.The results show how scientists can use the soundscape as a measure of biodiversity and environmental change, according to the researchers. Capturing responses from a variety of species at the same time can help scientists better understand how the ecosystem is affected as a whole, according to Ben Gottesman, a PhD candidate at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and lead author of the new research."Sometimes you can't visually assess an impact, but you can certainly capture that through changes in the soundscape," said Felix Martinez, an ecologist and Program Manager at the NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who will present the new findings Friday at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting, co-sponsored by the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, The Oceanography Society and the American Geophysical Union. "We really need to understand when those changes are natural versus due to some kind of stressor, whether it's human or natural."Similar to birds and frogs, fish call to find mates and defend spawning territories, producing choruses at specific times of day and specific times of the year. Gottesman suspects one reason the fish may have chorused more after Hurricane Irma -- which coincided with the full moon -- was because the water became very turbid, making it harder for them to be seen by predators.While the fish increased their activity following Hurricane Irma, shrimp snaps declined steeply during Maria and rebounded in the first few days after the storm. Snapping shrimp make a loud cracking noise with their claws to stun and catch prey. The snapping shrimp recorded in Puerto Rico displayed a very precise¬ schedule of when they snapped the most, almost like clockwork, Gottesman said. After the storms, peaks of snapping activity at dawn and dusk were less pronounced, and it took several days for them to recover to pre-storm levels.The researchers suspect the shrimp could have snapped less for several reasons. During the storms, the intense current and turbidity likely dissuaded the shrimps from seeking prey, or else the extreme turbidity muffled the high-frequency shrimp snaps. After the storm, Maria may have disturbed their rocky coral habitats, the shrimp could have been spending time cleaning out their burrows, or they may not have been able to see their prey when the water became turbid.Post-storm recordings show the land and sea animals' vocalizations in this part of Puerto Rico, which was not in the eye of the storm, did eventually rebound to pre-storm levels. Maria was a catastrophic disaster, causing an estimated $90 billion worth of damage, but the new findings show how resilient this coastal ecosystem was in response to the storm, according to the researchers. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
February 15, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180215105758.htm | Don't blame hurricanes for most big storm surges in Northeast | Hurricanes spawn most of the largest storm surges in the northeastern U.S., right? Wrong, according to a study by Rutgers University-New Brunswick scientists. | Extratropical cyclones , including nor'easters and other non-tropical storms, generate most of the large storm surges in the Northeast, according to the study in the In a first, the Rutgers scientists found intriguing trends after searching for clusters of, or similarities among, storms, said study coauthor Professor Anthony J. Broccoli, chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. It's a new way of studying atmospheric circulation.Understanding the climatology of storm surges driven by extratropical cyclones is important for evaluating future risks, especially as sea-level rise continues, the researchers said."The clusters are like rough police artist sketches of what surge-producing storms look like," Broccoli said. "Like facial recognition software, clustering is trying to find storms that look like one another.""We wanted to understand the large-scale atmospheric circulation associated with storm surges," said Arielle J. Catalano, the study's lead author and a doctoral student in the Graduate Program in Atmospheric Science at Rutgers-New Brunswick. "It's an atmospheric approach to the surge-producing storms."The study covered the 100 largest storm surges driven by extratropical cyclones at Sewells Point in Norfolk, Virginia, The Battery in southern Manhattan in New York City, and Boston, Massachusetts. It excluded hybrid systems, like Superstorm Sandy, that shifted from tropical to non-tropical or were tropical up to 18 hours before peak surges.The Rutgers scientists examined tide gauge records from the early 20th century through 2010. They analyzed atmospheric circulation during storms to look for clusters, and studied climate variability patterns that influenced circulation in the Northeast. They also looked at the probability of surges linked to much larger-scale atmospheric patterns that cover vast areas.They found that the biggest surges develop when slowly moving extratropical cyclones (low pressure systems) encounter a strong anticyclone, or high pressure system. That scenario leads to a tighter pressure gradient (the contrast between low and high pressure) and longer-lasting onshore winds, the study says.This favorable environment for large storm surges is influenced by large-scale atmospheric patterns, including El Niño, the Arctic Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Pacific-North American pattern.Though Superstorm Sandy in 2012 led to the largest storm surge on record at The Battery, extratropical cyclones spawned 88 of the 100 largest surges there.The November 1950 "Great Appalachian Storm," with wind gusts exceeding 140 mph in the mid-Atlantic region, generated the highest extratropical cyclone surge at The Battery: nearly 7.9 feet. That's only 20 percent smaller than Sandy's surge -- 13 percent smaller if sea-level rise is not considered, the study says.The water level during the 1950 storm was lower than during Sandy because the surge peaked at close to low tide. Future extratropical cyclones could cause Sandy-like flooding and coastal damages.At Sewells Point, the highest surge was 5.4 feet in November 2009, while the highest surge at Boston was nearly 6.3 feet in February 2010. Of the 100 largest surges at those locations, extratropical cyclones were responsible for 71 at Sewells Point and 91 at Boston."The elephant in the room is sea-level rise," Broccoli said. "That will likely matter more than how storms may change in the future, but what happens will be a combination of the two factors." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
February 12, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212130830.htm | Innovative restoration of coral reefs helps protect Caribbean islands | The catastrophic 2017 hurricane season provided ample demonstrations of the increasing vulnerability of Caribbean populations and infrastructure to natural disasters. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz and the Nature Conservancy have now measured the protective role of coral reefs and field-tested a solution that reduces coastal risks by combining innovative engineering with restoration ecology. | Working in Grenville Bay, Grenada, the researchers showed that degradation of coral reefs is directly linked to shoreline erosion and coastal flooding in parts of the bay. The study, published February 1 in the Investigating the link between healthy reefs and shoreline stability, the researchers found that Grenville's healthy reefs keep more than half of the bay's coastline intact by reducing the wave energy arriving on shore. In contrast, severe reef degradation is linked with chronic coastal erosion in the northern section of the bay, where the shoreline is disappearing at a rate of nearly two feet every year.In an attempt to adapt, villagers have built makeshift barriers with tires and driftwood to slow the erosion threatening their homes, but these efforts have been largely unsuccessful. The reef restoration project was designed to enhance both the ecological functions of natural reef habitat and its protective effects."We are able to apply coastal engineering tools and models to support reef science and management. Ours is one of the first studies to directly show with evidence from the field sites and engineering models the impacts of reef loss on shorelines," said lead author Borja Reguero, a researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.The study was part of an innovative coral reef restoration project called At the Water's Edge (AWE), a community-based initiative led by the Nature Conservancy to increase coastal resilience to climate change. The researchers field-tested a reef-based breakwater structure that represents one of the few existing examples of reef restoration designed to increase community resilience and decrease vulnerability. The aim is to facilitate the recovery of the coral reef and to directly reduce coastal erosion and flooding. With support from the German Federal Foreign Office and in partnership with Grenada Fund for Conservation, Grenada Red Cross Society, and community members, the pilot reef-based breakwater structure was formally launched in early January 2015."Grenada has been at the front lines of climate change both in impacts and importantly as a leader among small islands and developing states in addressing these problems," said AWE project lead Nealla Frederick.The reef restoration structure is made from inexpensive and locally-sourced materials and labor, easy to assemble on-site, suitable for high wave energy or hurricane exposure, and specially designed to encourage habitat restoration and enhancement. Live coral fragments from the existing reef were placed onto the structure to encourage natural reef growth. This approach is designed to be replicated in small island communities, which are often the most susceptible to the impacts of climate change.According to coauthor Michael Beck, lead marine scientist at the Nature Conservancy and research professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz, a growing body of scientific studies and project-based experience shows that coastal habitats such as coral reefs, oyster reefs, mangroves, wetlands, and dunes can offer cost-effective protection from the increasing impacts of climate change. This study builds on that knowledge, highlighting the potential and importance of prioritizing and investing in coastal habitats as effective and cost-effective natural infrastructure, he said. Island nations can meet their adaptation and hazard mitigation goals by investing in nature-based defenses, to significantly increase their coastal resilience and reduce the growing economic and human losses caused by coastal hazards."Reef degradation destroys the natural breakwaters for tropical coastlines in the United States and across more than 60 other nations. Our study identifies how severe this problem can be, and we used that information to design an innovative reef restoration solution to help people and nature," Beck said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
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