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February 9, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180209100733.htm | Texas flood: Researchers compare pollution levels before and after Hurricane Harvey | Recent years have seen rising interest in improving post-disaster research, with calls for more and better studies coming from the academic community and agencies such as the National Institutes of Health. Although understanding the wide-ranging effects of disasters is vital for an effective public health response, a lack of baseline data has made it difficult to attribute post-disaster changes in environmental conditions to the impacts of disasters. | In a new study published in the journal As disasters become more frequent and populations living in vulnerable areas increase, interest in the health effects of exposure to the combination of natural and technological disasters has grown. Flooding and disaster-related equipment failures can lead to far greater exposure to environmental health risks. In this study, Horney and colleagues focused on PAHs, which are a product of combustion from human activities such as petroleum consumption in transportation or natural processes such as wildfires.Since 2016, researchers from Texas A&M and the Texas Environment Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS), along with neighborhood residents, worked to collect data on resident's domestic exposure to PAHs by collecting and testing household dust. One week after Hurricane Harvey made landfall, researchers revisited 25 homes to collect and test soil samples."This project was only possible due to the ongoing partnership between Texas A&M, residents of Manchester, and community group TEJAS, who contacted us after Hurricane Harvey to return to Manchester to collect samples," Horney said.Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in late August 2017, brought more than 64 inches of rain to the Houston area, flooding 200,000 homes, 13 Superfund sites and more than 800 wastewater treatment facilities.In the laboratory, researchers extracted organic compounds from the pre-Harvey dust and post-Harvey soil samples and analyzed them using gas chromatography. Horney and her colleagues found evidence that flooding had redistributed PAHs in Manchester. Sites with higher PAH concentrations before the storm had lower concentrations afterward, and the opposite was true for sites with lower pre-hurricane PAH concentrations. However, the source of PAHs was consistent in samples from before and after Hurricane Harvey."Although this study was small, the unique ability to compare pre- and post-hurricane samples helps further our understanding of molecular changes following disasters," said Horney. "Gaining insight into how disasters like Hurricane Harvey can redistribute contaminants will help public health and emergency management personnel understand which areas are at greater risk during disasters, allowing for first responders and residents to take protective actions."Further research and additional collection of baseline data in environmental justice neighborhoods will help our understanding of disaster-related public health issues and could potentially improve disaster preparation and recovery planning | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
February 7, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180207140435.htm | Got a coastal bridge to retrofit? There's an optimal approach for that | Bridges make great metaphors for connection, as in "bridging our differences" and "building bridges." That may be because bridges play such a vital role in connecting people in real life. | And, in a natural disaster such as a flood, hurricane or tsunami, connecting people via functioning bridges can mean the difference between life and death during the event itself. In the aftermath, bridges are vital for recovery efforts.When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in the summer of 2017, damage to the city's infrastructure was considered an immediate potential threat to public health and safety during the storm. Repairing damaged structures afterwards was vital to the city's return to functioning -- though the price was steep. Moody's Analytics estimated that repair to Houston's infrastructure would cost $5 billion to $10 billion.Using probabilistic modeling and analysis, as well as advanced computer simulation, Dan Frangopol, the inaugural Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University, and his research team develop the tools and techniques necessary to assess the effects of multi-hazards, such as natural disasters, on infrastructure. They find optimum solutions that can save money, time and even lives.In their latest research, Frangopol and Mondoro integrated -- for the first time -- the three most common failure modes for bridges exposed to flooding, hurricanes, tsunamis, and other extreme hydrologic (water-related) events into a comprehensive risk assessment framework.The work fills a key gap in the way risk for such bridges is assessed over their life-cycle. Their research was published in in Deck, pier and foundation failure are the three most common bridge failure modes. However, the risk assessment of bridges exposed to hazards have typically included only one or two of these."Considering only one or two failure modes provides an incomplete picture because the risk level of each mode differs and, when assessed together, they compete with each other," says Frangopol. "Our analysis finds that any risk assessment must incorporate all pertinent failure modes of a structure."Frangopol and Mondoro illustrate their analytical method using a riverine bridge as an example. They calculated the impact of bridge retrofit actions on possible failure modes in terms of probability of failure, risk, and benefit-cost ratio using a logic modeling technique called an event tree.In the riverine bridge case study, all of the bridge retrofit options resulted in a reduction in the probability of failure for the examined bridge. However, these options did not provide a unilateral decrease in risk.For example, the addition of retrofit measures to prevent deck dislodgement decreased the probability of failure of the deck, and, in turn, the bridge. However, it increased the probability of failure of the foundation. Since the consequence of a foundation failure is larger, the overall risk is increased."Effective management strategies will vary depending on the bridge and the intensity and frequency of the hazard to which it is exposed," says Frangopol. "This may be of particular interest in regions where the impacts of natural and anthropogenic climate changes are felt most acutely."While the illustrative example focuses on the flooding hazard, the methodology can be applied to other extreme hydrologic events, such as hurricanes and tsunamis.Given aging U.S. infrastructure, limited public resources and the challenges created by a changing climate, the need to understand the most cost-efficient approach to the design, construction and maintenance of structures is more important than ever.Nearly twenty years ago, Frangopol pioneered life-cycle engineering, an approach to analyzing the true cost of structures which looks at cost and performance across their entire life span. He has been developing the field ever since.Frangopol boils the concept down to the question: "How do we encourage policy makers and engineers to take the long view rather than focus on the upfront sticker price?"The benefits of such an approach? Cost is certainly one. According to Civil Engineering Magazine, a life-cycle cost analysis is helping the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey save an estimated $100 million over 20 years on repairs to George Washington Bridge.Frangopol's research on bridge retrofitting is part an initiative spearheaded by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Frangopol, as part of the ASCE Industry Leaders Council, helps lead ASCE's efforts to achieve a "Grand Challenge" of reducing the life-cycle cost of infrastructure by 50 percent by 2025. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
February 6, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180206091541.htm | Building to withstand natural disasters pays off, new research shows | For every dollar the government spends to make existing buildings more resistant to wildfires, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, $6 is saved in property losses, business interruption and health problems, according to a new study led by CU Boulder Professor Keith Porter. | The study also found that for every $1 spent to exceed building codes and make structures more hazard-resistant in the future, $4 would be saved. In all, over the next 75 years, these measures could prevent 600 deaths, 1 million injuries and 4,000 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, the report concludes."Considering that natural-hazard losses continue to climb, exceeding $300 billion in 2017 alone, mitigation decisions are more pressing now than ever," said principal investigator Porter, a research professor in the department of civil, environmental and architectural engineering. "This study shows it pays to build new buildings better and to fix existing ones, and everybody wins when we do so."The multi-year study, Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves, was commissioned by the congressionally chartered nonprofit A 2005 version of the study found that for every $1 the Federal Emergency Management Agency spent to fortify existing buildings, taxpayers saved $4. That study has been instrumental in convincing governments around the world to invest in natural hazards mitigation. But the new expanded study suggests it underestimated how cost effective it can be.For the revision, Porter and a national team of scientists calculated how much the federal government spent on mitigation over the past 23 years.Then they used probabilistic risk assessment to calculate how much expense that mitigation avoided or will avoid. In addition to looking at earthquakes, hurricane winds, and river flooding-as the 2005 study did-they looked at fire at the wildland-urban interface (a growing problem in Colorado and California) and hurricane storm surge, which caused the bulk of damage from Hurricane Harvey in Texas.In addition to property and business losses, the new study included less-obvious costs like treating post-traumatic stress disorder, losing access to fire stations and hospitals, and paying search and rescue workers.And researchers asked a new question: What would the cost-benefit ratio be if, for one year, all new private sector buildings in high-risk areas were constructed to exceed existing codes?"There is nothing wrong with existing codes. Their purpose is to protect human life and they do that very well," said Porter.But when it comes to preventing buildings from becoming unusable, they can fall short, his research shows. (One CU Boulder study led by Porter found that should a 7.0 earthquake hit a metropolitan area in California, 25 percent of the buildings up to code would be collapsed, unsafe or damaged enough that use is restricted)."We wanted to find out what would happen if the goal of codes were to protect human life and to have the most resilient building stock possible that still makes economic sense."With the $27.4 billion the government invested in the past quarter-century, it will save $157.9 billion, the study found. Going forward, if private builders invested an additional $3.6 billion for just one year to exceed code, society would save $15.5 billion.In some areas of the country, the return would be even greater."There are counties in California where it makes economic sense to make buildings three times as strong and stiff as code requires and the benefit cost ratio could reach 8-to-1," said Porter.In several Colorado counties in the wildland-urban interface, requiring builders to adopt the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code, which requires things like fire-proof roofing materials, could save $3 for every $1 spent.Porter hopes the study will encourage lawmakers to invest more in hazard mitigation. Future studies will explore what society can do to incentivize builders to do the same."This past year was the costliest ever in the United States in terms of recorded disaster losses," said Peek. "This report charts a clear path forward, illustrating that investments that we make before disaster strikes can help reduce the harm and suffering caused by these events."Report: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
February 2, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180202153213.htm | Algorithm identifies vulnerable people during natural disasters | A new algorithm developed at the University of Waterloo will help first responders and home care providers better help the elderly during natural disasters. | According to the World Health Organization, older adults who live at home face disproportionally high fatality rates during natural disasters as evidenced by Hurricane Katrina where 71 per cent of the deaths resulting from that disaster involved people over 60 years of age."Frailty combined with social isolation can mean that older adults still living at home have nowhere to turn during emergencies," said John Hirdes, a researcher in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo. "With a growing proportion of elderly persons choosing to reside in their own homes, it's a very real concern. Home care services need to have mechanisms in place to manage the needs of their most vulnerable clients during disasters."Hirdes is also the senior Canadian researcher for interRAI, an international network of researchers committed to improving care and quality of life for vulnerable populations.The algorithm uses data from interRAI's home care assessment to generate an up-to-date list of vulnerable adults using home care services. It takes into account disability, health status, social isolation and the amount of support an individual may receive from informal caregivers.Eight provinces/territories, including Ontario, already mandate the use of the interRAI assessment for long-stay home care clients. Home care clients are assessed every six months to one year to determine their health status and service needs."Older adults living on their own are more difficult to locate and assist than those living in healthcare facilities," said Sandy Van Solm, the Emergency Management Coordinator at the Region of Waterloo who developed the algorithm as part of her PhD at Waterloo. "This algorithm helps us to plan for disasters in advance and allows responders to quickly generate an accurate list of those who may need help during a disaster."Hirdes and Van Solm are working with the Canadian Institute for Health Information to deploy the algorithm into interRAI home care software used across Canada beginning in 2018."It has the potential to save hundreds of lives," said Hirdes. "It's a tool that should be top of mind for any part of the country at risk of natural disasters."By 2036, seniors aged 65 years and older could represent a quarter of the total Canadian population, and one sixth of the global population.Details of the algorithm appear in the | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
January 29, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180129085801.htm | Causes and consequences of the 2015 Wimberley floods in Texas | A new study by Chad Furl, postdoctoral research associate, and Hatim Sharif, professor of civil and environmental engineering at The University of Texas at San Antonio, delves into the 2015 Wimberley, Texas floods that destroyed 350 homes and claimed 13 lives. Furl and Sharif researched the factors that led to the catastrophic flooding and shed light on new ways people in flood-prone areas can protect against future tragedies. | On Memorial Day weekend in 2015, the Blanco River rose to a record 40 feet. The swift rise of the water is known as a flash flood, a term familiar to Texans. The Texas Hill Country, where Wimberly is located, is known as "Flash Flood Alley" because it leads North America as the most flash-flood prone region.The rugged landscape tends to contribute to this moniker, in addition to urbanization. As natural areas become more and more developed, floods become more likely to occur because accumulating rainwater slides off concrete structures with nowhere to go, whereas plants and soil absorb that moisture. Furl and Sharif also say that flash floods are common in Texas due to its two heavy rain seasons in spring and fall that cause the soil to become oversaturated with rainwater."The flooding that occurred in Wimberley in 2015 were not at all uncharacteristic of the region," Sharif said. "It had rained heavily earlier in the month, so the soil was already soaked. It couldn't absorb any more rainwater."Another significant contribution to the tragic floods was the movement of the storm over Wimberley and neighboring areas around the Blanco River."The storm began upstream and moved downstream, with the water," said Sharif. "This is very important, because in a way the river and the storm were working together by moving in the same direction. As a result, the water became faster and higher because it was being fed in the perfect way by this storm."Furl and Sharif's study additionally points out that 2015 was an unprecedented year for flooding, breaking several records. However, the researchers also saw those new records broken again in 2016 and 2017, and call for more attention to be paid to these clear, unsettling warning signs."We saw catastrophic flooding in Houston and elsewhere just last year," said Sharif. "The winds of Hurricane Harvey didn't cause that devastation. It was the 275 trillion pounds of water that dented the crust of the Earth in the Houston area."Civil engineers like Furl and Sharif use the terms "500-year storm" and "100-year storm" to refer to weather events that measure the probability of a similar disaster happening in the future. In the past five years, Flash Flood Alley has seen two "500-year storms" and one "300-year storm." The researchers call for better storm preparations in light of this revelation, to allow for blocking roads and evacuation of residents."We need to do better for our citizens," said Sharif. "We can use innovation and insight to prevent more tragedies. It's absolutely within our grasp." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
January 11, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180111115332.htm | Urban insects are more resilient in extreme weather | A study led by Amy Savage, a Rutgers University-Camden assistant professor of biology, will help researchers understand how to make predictions and conservation decisions about how organisms living in cities will respond to catastrophic weather events. | Savage's analysis, conducted in New York City, compared the diversity of arthropods -- insects such as ants, bees, beetles, and wasps -- that were living in parks and street medians before and after Hurricane Sandy, which ravaged parts of New Jersey and New York in 2012.The study, "Homogenizing an Urban Habitat Mosaic: Arthropod diversity declines in New York City parks after Super Storm Sandy," was published in the journal The study shows that before the storm, the diversity was higher in the parks than in street medians. After the storm, arthropod diversity in the parks declined, resulting in communities in parks becoming indistinguishable from those in street medians. In other words, the higher diversity detected in parks before the storm was absent from post-storm samples.According to the Rutgers-Camden researcher, the study supports the hypothesis that organisms living in high-stress urban medians possess adaptions to disturbance, making them more resilient to the effects of extreme weather events than organisms living in relatively low-stress city parks.Researchers found that the arthropods that were most vulnerable to flooding were the same groups that were most sensitive to chronic stress in medians compared with parks before the storm."These data suggest that one result of the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will be homogenization of diversity in cities and that the direction of this simplification of urban communities may be quite predictable," says Savage. "It's very encouraging because it suggests that we may be able to make smart management decisions to mitigate the damaging effects of extreme weather events on urban ecosystems."In August of 2012, Savage began studying how diversity differed across habitats with different levels of environmental stress. Two months later, Hurricane Sandy struck Manhattan. Savage's team of researchers began studying the post-Sandy effects in the spring of 2013."When the storm hit, we were in a unique position to study how these arthropod communities responded to extreme storms," says Savage. "Testing these contrasting hypotheses was an opportunity to not only help people understand and plan for diversity changes after extreme weather events, but also to provide important data that would move the field of ecology forward."The research can be useful in future studies on how resilient urban ecosystems are to extreme weather events."Between Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season underscores this point," says Savage. "We can now use our data from Manhattan after Super Storm Sandy to make predictions about how diversity may change in Houston after Hurricane Harvey and in the urban centers of Puerto Rico after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, among other areas affected by these storms." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
January 2, 2018 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180102103325.htm | Invasive tree species: Call for action to tackle threat to a global biodiversity hotspot | An invasive Australian tree is now posing a serious threat to a global diversity 'hotspot' according to new collaborative research between Landcare Research in New Zealand, the Universities of Cambridge (UK) Denver (US) and Bangor University (UK). | This species, The National Park is a globally important hotspot of biodiversity with many rare and endangered species, including orchids, butterflies and birds, some of which are found nowhere else in the world except for the mountain forests of Jamaica.Studying these forests over a period of 40 years, the researchers found a continuing increase in the abundance of the invasive John Healey, Professor of Forest Sciences at Bangor University, explained: "Over the past 24 years the severity of this invasion was associated with a decline in the diversity of native tree species, including those species that are found only in Jamaica, which are the highest conservation priority. The 'mock orange' outpaces the growth of most native trees, and its dense foliage casts a dark shade over their seedlings severely restricting their regeneration."These results are reported in a paper published in the international journal This study provides good evidence for predicting that the threat posed to the globally important biodiversity of the Jamaican Blue Mountains will only increase, especially after the next hurricane seriously disrupts the canopy of the natural forest.One group of threatened plant species are the "bromeliads," which grow on the stems of native trees but cannot grow on the smooth bark of the mock orange. They have a water-filled hollow in the centre of their rosette of leaves, a tank which is home to insects that provide an important food source for the endangered Jamaican blackbird, the most severely threatened bird species in the Blue Mountains.If implemented now, active conservation measures could help to avert this global biodiversity catastrophe, both in Jamaica and in the many other global biodiversity hotspots that are threatened by invasive species. However, they are held back by lack of available resources.Lead researcher Peter Bellingham issued the following plea: "Given the strength of our evidence of the serious consequences of this invasion for biodiversity, we urge the relevant institutions in Jamaica, and international funding bodies, to prioritise a programme of control of this species. We are sure that active intervention at this stage would be very cost effective, reducing the much greater costs of trying to restore the native forests if the invasion is allowed to spread further." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,018 |
December 13, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171213104958.htm | Human-caused warming likely intensified Hurricane Harvey's rains | New research shows human-induced climate change increased the amount and intensity of Hurricane Harvey's unprecedented rainfall. The new findings are being published in two separate studies and being presented at the 2017 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, along with additional new findings about recent Atlantic Ocean hurricanes. | Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria battered the U.S. Gulf Coast and Caribbean earlier this year, bringing widespread flooding and wind damage. Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm at first landfall on August 25, stalled over Texas as a tropical storm, causing record rainfall between August 26 and 28.A new study accepted for publication in The new research confirms heavy rainfall events are increasing across the Gulf Coast region because of human interference with the climate system. Climate change, caused by increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, is raising temperatures globally. Warmer air can carry more moisture, which can lead to more extreme rainfall events, and warmer ocean surface temperatures are known to intensify the most powerful hurricanes.In the GRL study, researchers used a statistical model based on historical climate data to separate how much of the extreme rainfall from Hurricane Harvey was due to natural influences and how much was due to human influences. They first estimated the chances of Harvey's precipitation total at the present day then estimated the amount of precipitation that would have fallen in an event of the same rarity using 1950s greenhouse gas levels, essentially stripping away the effects of today's higher greenhouse levels.The study's authors expected about a 6 percent increase in rainfall from Hurricane Harvey because of warming in the Gulf of Mexico. The new study finds human-induced climate change likely increased Hurricane Harvey's unprecedented rainfall by at least 19 percent and potentially as much as 38 percent."It is not news that climate change affects extreme precipitation, but our results indicate that the amount is larger than expected," said researcher Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, a co-author of the new GRL study, who will also be presenting the new research at a press conference at the AGU Fall Meeting today.In the new study in ERL, researchers examined the observed rainfall record in the Gulf Coast region since 1880 to show that the intensity of extreme precipitation has increased substantially. Multiple high-resolution climate models confirmed that the increasing trend is due mainly to human-caused global warming.Overall, the chances of seeing a rainfall event as intense as Harvey have roughly tripled - somewhere between 1.5 and five times more likely - since the 1900s and the intensity of such an event has increased between 8 percent and 19 percent, according to the new study by researchers with World Weather Attribution, an international coalition of scientists that objectively and quantitatively assesses the possible role of climate change in individual extreme weather events.Even if global targets set by the Paris Agreement of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) are met, scientists estimate an event like Hurricane Harvey will see a further increase of about a factor of three in probability."But, if we miss those targets, the increase in frequency and intensity could be much higher," said Karin van der Wiel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in De Bilt, Netherlands and a co-author of the new ERL paper. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
December 6, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171206141643.htm | Birth of a storm in the Arabian Sea validates climate model | Researchers from Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report in the journal Nature Climate Change that extreme cyclones that formed in the Arabian Sea for the first time in 2014 are the result of global warming and will likely increase in frequency. Their model showed that the burning of fossil fuels since 1860 would lead to an increase in the destructive storms in the Arabian Sea by 2015, marking one of the first times that modeled projections have synchronized with real observations of storm activity, the researchers said. | In October 2014, Cyclone Nilofar formed off the western coast of India. The unusual system was the first extremely severe cyclonic storm (ESCS) -- defined by wind speeds greater than 102 miles per hour -- on record to appear in the Arabian Sea after South Asia's monsoon season. Cyclones commonly develop in the Arabian Sea after the monsoon season, but none as ferocious as Nilofar, which produced winds of up 130 miles per hour and led to the evacuation of 30,000 people in India.Then, in 2015, two even stronger extreme cyclones rolled in off the Arabian Sea -- in one week. From Oct. 28 to Nov. 4, Cyclone Chapala -- the second strongest cyclone ever recorded on the Arabian Sea -- brought winds of up to 150 miles per hour and dumped the equivalent of several years' worth of rain on the arid nations of Yemen, Oman and Somalia. Cyclone Megh unleased a second wave of destruction only a few days later. The storms killed 27 people and devastated the already fragile economies and infrastructures of the affected nations. The Yemeni island of Socotra was destroyed by flooding and wind damage.The researchers analyzed simulations of global and regional cyclone cycles shortly after the 2015 storms to help determine their cause.Especially notable is that their model projected an increase in post-monsoon extreme cyclones in the Arabian Sea by 2015 that was similar to what actually happened, said first author Hiro Murakami, an associate research scholar in Princeton's Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. It is difficult for a climate model to accurately project for a defined location at a certain time."This may be the first time that we see synchronicity between a modeled projection and real observations of storm activity in a specific region during a specific season," Murakami said. He worked with Gabriel Vecchi, Princeton professor of geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute, and Seth Underwood at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) located on Princeton's Forrestal Campus."It is still challenging to predict the year in which an ESCS will occur in the future," Murakami said. "What we emphasize is that the probability of occurrence is increasing relative to that in preindustrial conditions. It would not be surprising if we see a new ESCS generated in late season in the next few years."This year, Cyclone Ockhi, which formed Nov. 29 and dissipated Dec. 6, left at least 39 dead in Sri Lanka and India. Belonging to the lower classification of a very severe cyclonic storm, Ockhi was nonetheless the most intense Arabian Sea cyclone since Megh with wind speeds peaking at 115 miles per hour.These powerful new storms strike areas of the world made vulnerable by poverty, conflict and a lack of experience with a cyclone's heavy wind and rain, Murakami said."Large economic losses would be expected in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia along the Arabian Sea," he said. "These countries are highly sensitive to storm hazards and impacts due to a lack of adaption strategies. These regions experience comparatively low climatological storm exposure."The driving force behind the appearance of the ESCSs was higher-than-normal temperatures. Murakami, Vecchi and Underwood used a high-resolution model at GFDL known as HiFLOR to simulate cyclone activity in the Arabian Sea under two scenarios. The first was natural variability such as some years being hotter than others. HiFLOR is able to reproduce observed variations in the frequency of category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the North Indian Ocean, then project that fluctuation onto other regions and storm systems. This results in a realistic simulation of natural variability.The second simulation factored in increased atmospheric concentrations of sulfate, organic carbon, black carbon and other compounds that result from human activities. Black carbon and sulfates especially result from burning fossil fuels and biomass such as wood, a popular fuel in South Asia. The researchers ran their simulations with the levels of these substances as they were in the years 1860, 1940, 1990 and 2015.They found significant increases in the occurrence of post-monsoon ESCSs in the Arabian Sea in 1990 and 2015 -- the latter of which matched the recent storms. (Real observations of extreme cyclone activity in the Arabian Sea are limited because there was no full weather-satellite coverage in this area before 1998.) New models are being developed to more accurately account for the influence of human-made aerosols on the creation of extreme cyclones over the Arabian Sea, Murakami said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
December 5, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171205120000.htm | Beyond wind speed: A new measure for predicting hurricane impacts | Six major hurricanes that engulfed the Atlantic Basin in 2017 were a devastating reminder of the vulnerability of coastal communities, where more than half the U.S. population resides. | What if there was a better way to forecast and communicate these storms' damaging economic impacts, before they happen?Colorado State University civil engineers have developed an innovative new approach to assessing the resiliency of coastal communities to hurricanes. They've created a "multi-hazard hurricane impact level model," which estimates economic damages to be caused by storms, before they happen.The impact model is detailed in a recent paper in "Our model forecasts storms more in terms of impacts," Mahmoud explained. Forecasters typically communicate about approaching storms by categorizing sustained wind speeds on the Saffir-Simpson scale.Wind speed, however, is not usually the main cause of death and destruction from hurricanes, the researchers say. The worst impacts are usually caused by flooding, precipitation and storm surge, combined with geography of landfall, population density, and quality of infrastructure. The researchers wanted to come up with a more accurate way to talk about impacts. Their goal is to provide communication about a tropical storm's expected economic damage, rather than only the meteorological intensity of the storm, Pilkington said.Mahmoud and Pilkington's impact model uses artificial neural networks and machine learning to "teach" a computer program how to predict a pending storm's damage, by dollar figure. The neural network, which is like an artificial human brain that gets smarter the more data it is fed, is powered by detailed historical data from several storms. These include Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Arthur in 2014.Mahmoud and Pilkington used this historical data to train neural networks to connect actual storm characteristics to actual known outcomes from those storms. To feed their model, they used publicly available data from federal agencies. Their model uses inputs including estimated landfall, population affected, maximum wind speed, maximum storm surge, and total precipitation.Then, they tested the model in real time during actual storms, including most recently Hurricane Harvey, which hit the Gulf Coast around Houston, Texas, in August.The researchers also used their model to analyze whether physical and policy improvements such as seawalls, the National Flood Insurance Program, and updated building codes have mitigated the impacts of powerful storms. In short, they haven't, the researchers say.According to their data, coastal communities in Florida or Texas are about as economically vulnerable, or even worse off, to hurricane devastation as they were 100 years ago. That's a sobering reality the engineers hope their work can shed light on.The number of people living in coastal communities has increased exponentially in 100 years, and with it, infrastructure and highways. "Improved building codes and other changes have not been enough to keep up with the sheer volume of wealth, infrastructure and people in those areas," Pilkington said.Pilkington, whose interests intersect in meteorology and civil engineering, wants the model to make a real difference in people's lives. "My ultimate goal is to have it be used by someone -- whether the National Weather Service or elsewhere," she said. "We should be communicating to the public in terms of impact instead of intensity."Mahmoud and Pilkington are continuing to advance their model with better data, providing an even more accurate picture for hurricanes going forward. They also plan to use it to predict effects of climate change. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
November 27, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171127173220.htm | Identifying optimal adaptation of buildings threatened by hurricanes, climate change | The need for adaptation strategies to reduce the threat of hurricanes to society is of critical importance, as evidenced by the recent damage to coastal regions in the U.S. and the Caribbean this past year. The fact that the number of residential buildings in coastal areas has increased significantly combined with the increasing risks of impacts of due climate change means that the cost of damage to coastal developments are likely to continue to rise. | According to Dan M. Frangopol, the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University and You Dong, Assistant Professor of Structural Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the majority of previous studies have focused on structural performance and loss assessment under hurricanes.In a paper, recently published in the In their paper, called "Adaptation Optimization of Residential Buildings under Hurricane Threat Considering Climate Change in a Lifecycle Context," Frangopol and Dong present a systematic framework for the optimal adaptation of residential buildings at a large scale under various scenarios of impending climate change during a long-term interval. Different adaptation strategies are investigated to ensure adequate structural performance and to mitigate the damage loss and adverse consequences to society. A genetic algorithm-based optimization process is adopted to determine the optimal adaptation types associated with buildings within an investigated region. The framework considers the probabilistic occurrence models of hurricanes, structural vulnerability of typical residential buildings, possible climate change scenarios, and optimization of various climate adaptation strategies in a lifecycle context.They apply their approach to a real-life case study: a group of single-family residential buildings located in Miami-Dade County, Florida.The article concludes:"This paper proposed a general computational procedure associated with optimal adaptation strategies of residential buildings subjected to hurricanes and climate change effects. The loss of buildings under probabilistic wind hazard is computed and the effects of adaptation on structural performance are considered in a lifecycle context. The optimal structural adaptation strategies are identified considering expected lifecycle loss/benefit and total structural adaptation cost during the investigated time interval. The presented approach was illustrated on residential buildings located in Miami- Dade County, Florida.The following conclusions are drawn:2. For the case study analyzed in this paper, the buildings within 1-10 km of the shore revealed the largest loss compared with the buildings located in other regions. Furthermore, buildings built before 1970 contribute substantially to the total annual loss for the buildings located in this region.3. The changes in the probability of occurrence and intensity of hurricanes due to climate change have significant effects on the expected lifecycle loss of the buildings within the investigated region. The change associated with hazard intensity has a larger effect on the loss than that due to the increase of the hazard occurrence rate.4. Optimum adaptation strategies of residential buildings can be obtained by using a biobjective approach, resulting in a Pareto optimal front. This allows decision makers to make informed decisions based on their particular preference.5. The cost-benefit evaluation and optimization of adaptation actions can produce the best structural adaptation strategies considering both the expected lifecycle loss and total structural adaptation cost. The cost and benefit can be considered together to determine the effectiveness of an alternative.6. Within the context of climate change engineering, lifecycle loss, cost-benefit analysis, and optimization can provide the decision maker important information necessary for assessment and adaptation of structural systems at a large scale. This information can be used in design, maintenance, and management processes of civil infrastructure considering extreme events and climate change."Prof. Dan M. Frangopol is the inaugural holder of the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University. He is "widely recognized as a leading educator and creator in the field of life-cycle engineering." (ASCE). His main research interests are in the development and application of probabilistic concepts and methods to civil and marine engineering, including: structural reliability; life-cycle cost analysis; probability-based assessment, design, and multi-criteria life-cycle optimization of structures and infrastructure systems; structural health monitoring; life-cycle performance maintenance and management of structures and distributed infrastructure under extreme events (earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and floods); risk-based assessment and decision making; multi-hazard risk mitigation; infrastructure sustainability and resilience to disasters; climate change adaptation; and probabilistic mechanics. His research, teaching and service have garnered numerous awards from ASCE, IASSAR, IABSE, SAE and other professional organizations.According to ASCE "Dan M. Frangopol is a preeminent authority in bridge safety and maintenance management, structural systems reliability, and life-cycle civil engineering. His contributions have defined much of the practice around design specifications, management methods, and optimization approaches. From the maintenance of deteriorated structures and the development of system redundancy factors to assessing the performance of long-span structures, Dr. Frangopol's research has not only saved time and money, but very likely also saved lives." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
November 14, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171114123412.htm | Artificially cooling planet 'risky strategy' | Proposals to reduce the effects of global warming by imitating volcanic eruptions could have a devastating effect on global regions prone to either tumultuous storms or prolonged drought, new research has shown. | Geoengineering -- the intentional manipulation of the climate to counter the effect of global warming by injecting aerosols artificially into the atmosphere -- has been mooted as a potential way to deal with climate change.However new research led by climate experts from the University of Exeter suggests that targeting geoengineering in one hemisphere could have a severely detrimental impact for the other.They suggest that while injections of aerosols in the northern hemisphere would reduce tropical cyclone activity -- responsible for such recent phenomena including Hurricane Katrina -- it would at the same time lead to increased likelihood for drought in the Sahel, the area of sub-Saharan Africa just south of the Sahara desert.In response, the team of researchers have called on policymakers worldwide to strictly regulate any large scale unilateral geoengineering programmes in the future to prevent inducing natural disasters in different parts of the world.The study is published in leading scientific journal Dr Anthony Jones, A climate science expert from the University of Exeter and lead author on the paper said: "Our results confirm that regional solar geoengineering is a highly risky strategy which could simultaneously benefit one region to the detriment of another. It is vital that policymakers take solar geoengineering seriously and act swiftly to install effective regulation."The innovative research centres on the impact solar geoengineering methods that inject aerosols into the atmosphere may have on the frequency of tropical cyclones.The controversial approach, known as stratospheric aerosol injection, is designed to effectively cool the Earth's surface by reflecting some sunlight before it reaches the surface. The proposals mimic the aftermath of volcanic eruptions, when aerosols are naturally injected into the atmosphere.In the study, the researchers use sophisticated simulations with a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean model to investigate the effect of hemispheric stratospheric aerosol injection on North Atlantic tropical cyclone frequency.They find injections of aerosols in the northern hemisphere would decrease North Atlantic tropical cyclone frequency, while injections contained to the southern hemisphere may potentially enhance it.Crucially, the team warn however that while tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic could be suppressed by northern hemisphere injections, this would, at the same time, induce droughts in the Sahel.These results suggest the uncertain effects of solar geoengineering -- a proposed approach to counteract global warming -- which should be considered by policymakers.Professor Jim Haywood, from the Mathematics department at the University of Exeter and co-author of the study added: "This research shows how a global temperature target such as 1.5 or 2C needs to be combined with information on a more regional scale to properly assess the full range of climate impacts." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
November 13, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171113153831.htm | Texas' odds of Harvey-scale rainfall to increase by end of century | As the city of Houston continues to recover and rebuild following the historic flooding unleashed by Hurricane Harvey, the region will also have to prepare for a future in which storms of Harvey's magnitude are more likely to occur. | A new MIT study, published online this week in the According to the study, the state of Texas had a 1 percent chance of experiencing rainfall of Harvey's magnitude for any given year between 1981 and 2000. By the end of this century, the annual probability of Hurricane Harvey's record rainfall returning to Texas will rise to 18 percent, if the growth of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere continues unmitigated.If the risk for such an event during this century increased in a steady, linear fashion, it would mean that there was a 6 percent chance of having Harvey's magnitude of rainfall in Texas this year."You're rolling the dice every year," says study author Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science and co-director of the Lorenz Center at MIT. "And we believe the odds of a flood like Harvey are changing."When the past isn't a guideIn the wake of a large disaster, Emanuel says it is natural, and in some cases essential, to ask whether and how soon such an event will occur again."Suppose you're the mayor of Houston, and you've just had a terrible disaster that cost you an unbelievable fortune, and you're going to try over the next few years to put things back in order in your city," Emanuel says. "Should you be putting in a more advanced storm-sewer system that may cost billions of dollars, or not? The answer to that question depends upon whether you think Harvey was a one-off -- very unlikely to happen any time in the next 100 years -- or whether it may be more common than you thought."Looking at historical records of extreme rainfall will not provide much insight into the future, Emanuel says. That's because past measurements have been spotty and difficult to extrapolate across larger regions, and the period over which rainfall data have been recorded is relatively short. What's more, climate change is shifting the odds in terms of the frequency of high-intensity storms around the world."If the underlying statistics are changing, the past may not be a good guide to the future," Emanuel notes in the paper.Instead, scientists are turning to climate models to try and forecast the future of storms like Harvey. But there, challenges also arise, as models that simulate changing climate at a global scale do so at relatively coarse resolution, of around hundreds of kilometers, while hurricanes require resolutions of a few kilometers."[Climate models] do simulate slushy hurricane-like storms, but they're very poorly resolved," Emanuel says. "We don't have the computational firepower to resolve storms like hurricanes in today's climate models."Emanuel and his colleagues had previously devised a technique to simulate hurricane development in a changing climate, using a specialized computational model they developed that simulates hurricanes at high spatial resolutions. The model is designed so that they can embed it within coarser global climate models -- a combination that results in precise simulations of hurricanes in the context of a globally changing climate.Emanuel used the team's technique to model past and future hurricane activity for both the city of Houston and the state of Texas. To do so, he first embedded the hurricane model in three gridded climate analyses -- simulations of global climate, based on actual data from the past -- to simulate hurricane activity near Houston between 1980 and 2016.He randomly seeded each climate model with hundreds of thousands of "proto-hurricanes," or early-stage storms, the majority of which naturally peter out and don't grow to become full-fledged hurricanes. Of the remaining storms, he focused on the 3,700 storms that passed within 300 kilometers of Houston between 1980 and 2016. He then noted the frequency of storms that produced 500 millimeters of rainfall or more -- the amount of rain that was initially estimated immediately following Hurricane Harvey.During this historical period, he calculated that the probability of a Harvey-like storm producing at least 500 millimeters of rain in Houston was around once in 2,000 years. Such an event, he writes, was "'biblical' in the sense that it likely occurred around once since the Old Testament was written."To get a sense for how this probability, or risk of such a storm, will change in the future, he performed the same analysis, this time embedding the hurricane model within six global climate models, and running each model from the years 2081 to 2100, under a future scenario in which the world's climate changes as a result of unmitigated growth of greenhouse gas emissions.While Houston's yearly risk of experiencing a 500-millimeter rainfall event was around 1 in 2,000 at the end of the last century, Emanuel found the city's annual odds will increase significantly, to one in 100 by the end of this century.When he performed the same set of analyses for Texas as a whole, he found that, at the end of the 20th century, the state faced a 1 percent risk each year of experiencing a Harvey-scale storm. By the end of this century, that annual risk will increase to 18 percent. If this increase happens linearly, he calculates that this year, the state's odds were at about 6 percent -- a sixfold increase since the late 20th century."When you take a very, very rare, extreme rainfall event like Hurricane Harvey, and you shift the distribution of rain toward heavier amounts because of climate change, you get really big changes in the probability of those rare events," Emanuel says. "People have to understand that damage is usually caused by extreme events."Emanuel hopes that the study's results will help city planners and government officials to decide where and how to rebuild and fortify infrastructure, as well as whether to recode building standards to stand up to stronger storms and more damaging floods."We're seeing for Texas an event whose annual probability was 1 percent at the end of the last century, and it might be 18 percent by the end of this century," Emanuel says. "That's a huge increase in the probability of that event. So, people had better plan for that." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
November 8, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171108092006.htm | We should use central pressure deficit, not wind speed, to predict hurricane damage | The system for categorizing hurricanes accounts only for peak wind speeds, but research published in | "Sandy is the classic example. It was a very big storm, but in terms of maximum wind speed it was arguably not a hurricane," said Dan Chavas, an assistant professor of atmospheric science at Purdue University who led the study. "If you looked at the central pressure deficit, you would have expected it to cause a lot of damage. But if you used maximum wind speed, as people usually do, you wouldn't expect it to do the damage that it did."Central pressure deficit refers to the difference in pressure between the center of the storm and outside it. Pressure and wind speed have been used interchangeably to estimate potential damage from hurricanes for years, but the relationship between them has been a long-standing riddle in tropical meteorology.Chavas and his colleagues have defined a theory that solves that riddle. Previous work has observed that central pressure deficit depends on maximum wind speed, storm size, and latitude, but Chavas' team has determined why that is.Scientists could use this theory to calculate peak wind speed if they had numbers for the other metrics in the equation, which could come in handy because wind speeds need to be measured at several points of a storm, making it difficult to get an accurate reading.The research team tested their theory on two simulations of Earth.The first used the actual distribution of sea surface temperatures and solar radiation since 1979 to produce conditions similar to real historical climate.The second simulation produced a very simplified version of the Earth. It had no land, and ocean temperature and solar radiation were the same everywhere. This made the entire planet sort of like the tropics, meaning hurricanes could pop up anywhere -- but they still tended to form at low latitudes and move westward and toward the poles, like they do on Earth."The idea is that if we test our theory in this very simple world, and then take it to the real world where everything is much more complicated and we get the same results, all that complexity is irrelevant," Chavas said. "People tend to work in different worlds -- either the simplified world or the real world, and they don't talk to each other that much. We're bridging that gap."The limitations of the official scale for hurricane categorization, the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, have come under scrutiny recently. The wind speed meteorologists settle on is often only an estimate, and it's also highly localized because it depends on a speed sustained for a short time in one location. However, it's popular with the public and media because of its simplicity.Some have advocated for new systems of categorization, including the Cyclone Damage Potential Index and the Integrated Kinetic Energy index. Both of these systems take into account factors other than wind speed -- the idea being that more variables make a scale more valuable.Boiling down a storm's complexity to a single number may be unrealistic, but there are surely ways to improve the current system. The Purdue team's work shows that central pressure deficit itself may achieve this goal, or at least do a better job than maximum wind speed alone. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
November 2, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171102151038.htm | Scientists identify hotspots of coastal risks in Latin America and the Caribbean | The catastrophic 2017 hurricane season provided ample demonstrations of the vulnerability of populations and infrastructure in coastal areas to natural disasters. A new study by scientists at UC Santa Cruz and the University of Cantabria, Spain, identifies hotspots of coastal risks throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. | Published November 2 in "We found that more than 500,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean are living in areas where coastal hazards and poverty converge," said lead author Juliano Calil. "These are communities where scarce critical resources are consistently placed in hazards-prone areas, further exacerbating the impacts of coastal hazards."The researchers developed techniques for incorporating a wide range of data into their assessments, allowing them to identify major drivers of risk in ways that can inform coastal policies."This study aims at informing coastal risk reduction and adaptation policies by providing the spatial distribution of a variety of key drivers of risk and coastal risk hotspots along the region," said coauthor Iñigo J. Losada, research director at the Environmental Hydraulics Institute at the University of Cantabria.Major hotspots of coastal risk identified in the study include the coastal province of El Oro in Ecuador, the state of Sinaloa in Mexico, and the province of Usulutan in El Salvador. All three regions have large populations concentrated in areas with the maximum coastal risk index value of 5."The techniques employed in the study provide a robust toolset to identify patterns through multivariate and complex datasets," said coauthor Fernando J. Méndez, associate professor of coastal engineering at the University of Cantabria. "This approach has many benefits, including the ability to process large-volume, multidimensional datasets."According to Calil, natural hazards cause disproportionate impacts on vulnerable groups, such as the poor, which tend to live in high-risk areas and lack basic resources to prepare for natural disasters. The authors concluded that risk mitigation efforts must look beyond just hardening and armoring the coastline."Risks reduction and coastal adaptation efforts should not focus exclusively on developing coastal defenses," Calil said. "They must also consider better policies related to urban development, zoning, agriculture and land conservation practices, as well as on improving socioeconomic conditions." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
October 16, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171016102814.htm | When lemons give you life: Herpetofauna adaptation to citrus orchards in Belize | Natural habitat areas exhibit similar abundances and diversity of herpetofauna as citrus orchards and reclaimed orchard forests in Stann Creek, Belize, reports a comparative study by researchers Russell Gray and Dr. Colin Strine of Suranaree University of Technology (SUT), Thailand. | The scientists utilized several drift-fence arrays equipped with double-funnel traps to monitor and compare reptile and amphibian communities in a lowland broadleaf forest, a lime orchard and a reclaimed citrus orchard at the Toucan Ridge Ecology and Education Society (TREES) field station. Their study was recently published in the open-access journal Often referred to as Central America's "hidden gem" for its abundance of undisturbed rainforests and natural beauty, Belize has a long-standing record for vigorously protecting and maintaining their forested areas. However, just as in any other developing country, its primary sector is expanding with agricultural land clearings becoming more frequent with newly established properties.Approximately midway through the study (June -- September 2016), the site was hit by Hurricane Earl, a Category 1 hurricane. The hurricane-force winds altered the canopy cover significantly over the forested study sites, due to felled trees and broken branches.Surprisingly enough, the herpetofauna remained relatively unchanged in the aftermath of Earl. The phenomenon revealed that not only were herpetofaunal communities lacking sensitivity to anthropogenic changes in the area, but also to extreme weather events, even though these had affected most of the standing vegetation.Some notable observations occurred within three days of Hurricane Earl, according to Russell Gray:"One of the trapping system was catching arboreal [tree climbing] snake species, like the cat-eyed snake and blunt-headed tree snake. This wasn't only interesting because arboreal snakes were caught in terrestrial traps, but rather because they were never caught in our traps during the study up to this point.""Even more interesting is that they were caught exclusively in the manicured orchard area, which makes me wonder if they somehow predicted falling trees and fled to the only habitat without them. Some animals appear to forecast weather events due to sudden or drastic changes in environmental conditions. I wonder if this is a similar case."Amongst other notable scientific discoveries reported during the project were two new accounts of the Petén Centipede Snake (Further noteworthy instances were two range extensions for relatively data deficient species -- one for the Doflein's Salamander (Besides providing important data on herpetofauna assemblages in various disturbed and undisturbed habitats in Belize, the research identifies future conservation methods to be considered.The study serves as new evidence that as long as agricultural areas remain surrounded with natural habitat buffers, they have little effect on herpetofaunal communities.Replicates of this study are encouraged by the authors and can be utilized as a feasible and efficient way to monitor reptiles and amphibians in Belize.Although Belize still preserves a considerable amount of intact forest cover, there are several on-going conservation concerns. Besides agricultural land clearings, there are constant struggles with xate poachers, or "Xateros," on the Guatemalan border, as well as illegal logging activities and illegal off-season hunting.Unfortunately, reptiles and amphibians have been understudied in comparison to other vertebrates and government action is rarely enforced on their conservation throughout the Neotropics.A striking example of this relates to the only critically endangered reptile in Belize -- the Hickatee turtle (Dermatemys mawii). Although the species is likely to become extinct, it is still traditionally collected for its culinary value, while its hunting is banned only in May.In conclusion, the authors note that it is crucial to pay close attention to anthropogenic activity and the potential repercussions it may have on native species. With extensive and active efforts to study Mesoamerican herpetofauna, proper conservation efforts can be implemented and focused. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
October 16, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171016102805.htm | Harvey runoff menaces Texas' coral reefs | The more than 13 trillion gallons of floodwater from Hurricane Harvey have created a massive plume of freshwater in the Gulf of Mexico that is threatening the coral reefs of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary about 100 miles offshore of Galveston. | Harvey produced record rainfall over southeast Texas, and that water is now flowing through the Gulf. The Texas Automated Buoy System, run by the Geochemical and Environmental Research Group (GERG) at Texas A&M University, is a network of buoys that monitors the waters off the Texas coast and relays real-time ocean data. On Sept. 28, the system measured a 10 percent drop in salinity at Buoy V in the Flower Garden Banks coral reefs. This week a team of experts from Rice University, the University of Houston-Clear Lake, Texas A&M and Boston University will sail from Galveston on a five-day expedition to the reefs. They will work in collaboration with staff scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries to collect samples of water, microbes, sediment, corals and sponges to monitor the health of the reefs."The salinity at one buoy on the reef dropped from 36 to 32 on Sept. 28, but it rebounded to 36 by Oct. 4, and it has been between 35 and 36 since then," said Rice marine biologist Adrienne Correa, one of the expedition scientists. "We don't yet know what impact the low salinity had on the reef while it was there."Expedition member and GERG scientist Kathryn Shamberger, a Texas A&M oceanographer who took measurements at the reef in late September, said the team is collaborating with scientists across Texas to track the plume of Harvey floodwater as it migrates through the Gulf."The Harvey freshwater had moved toward Corpus Christi and was northwest of the Flower Garden Banks when I was on the last cruise," Shamberger said. "But that cruise ended Oct. 1 and things could be very different by now."Correa, Shamberger and Boston University biologist Sarah Davies, UH-Clear Lake biologist Lory Santiago-Vazquez and Texas A&M oceanographer Jason Sylvan expect to receive a one-year Rapid Research Response grant from the National Science Foundation to support their work at the Flower Garden Banks. That grant and their post-Harvey research at the reefs have roots in the April 2016 "Tax Day Floods" that also inundated parts of Houston."In late July 2016 there was a partial die-off on the East Flower Garden Banks," said Correa, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. "We didn't know it was happening until a recreational dive boat happened to go out there and see it. Because we didn't know about the risk ahead of time, we couldn't sample on a timeline that made it easy to figure out a mechanism for the die-off. With Harvey, we were able to catch the 'before' much better than we were in 2016."Correa said she hopes the Harvey floodwater plume continues to travel down the coast to the southwest because that will carry it farther from the fragile reefs. She said the Harvey floodwater would likely have devastated the reefs if it had flowed directly over them. But even absent a direct hit, she said, there is risk through early November of eddies and steering currents bringing enough floodwater to the reefs to reduce salinity to unhealthy levels."When people look at the impact of hurricanes on coral reefs, they often look at physical damage or breakage of reef frameworks by waves and storm surge," Correa said. "Much less is known about the impacts of freshwater influx from the precipitation associated with a hurricane." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
October 12, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171012151803.htm | Warming seas could lead to 70 percent increase in hurricane-related financial loss | If oceans warm at a rate predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation-sponsored group that assesses climate change research and issues periodic reports, expected financial losses caused by hurricanes could increase more than 70 percent by 2100, according to a study just published in the journal | The finding is based on the panel's most severe potential climate change -- and resulting increased sea surface temperature -- scenario and is predicted at an 80 percent confidence level.The results of the study, which focused on 13 coastal counties in South Carolina located within 50 miles of the coastline, including the most populous county, Charleston, are drawn from a model simulating hurricane size, intensity, track and landfall locations under two scenarios: if ocean temperatures remain unchanged from 2005 to 2100 and if they warm at a rate predicted by the IPCC's worst-case scenario.Under the 2005 climate scenario, the study estimates that the expected loss in the region due to a severe hurricane -- one with a 2 percent chance of occurring in 50 years -- would be $7 billion. Under the warming oceans scenario, the intensity and size of the hurricane at the same risk level is likely to be much greater, and the expected loss figure climbs to $12 billion.The model drew on hurricane data for the last 150 years gathered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, then created simulated hurricanes under the two scenarios over 100,000 years and estimated the damage from every storm that made landfall in the study area.Researchers then overlaid information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's HAZUS database, a zip-code-by-zip-code inventory of building types and occupancy. HAZUS sets out loss estimates according to wind speed for costs of repair, replacement, content and inventory, as well as costs resulting from loss of use, such rental income loss, business interruption and daily production output loss.The researchers did not find that warming oceans will lead to more frequent hurricanes, only that warmer seas will lead to higher wind speeds and storms that are greater in size and therefore cover a larger area.The losses are calculated based only on wind and wind-driven rain and do not include the large financial impacts of storm surge or flooding."The study shows that a significant increase in damage and loss is likely to occur in coastal Carolina, and by implication other coastal communities, as a result of climate change," said one of the authors of the paper, David Rosowky, a civil engineer at the University of Vermont and the university's provost."To be prepared, we need to build, design, zone, renovate and retrofit structures in vulnerable communities to accommodate that future," he said.The study was based on the IPPC's Fifth Assessment, issued in 2013 and 2014. The worst-case ocean warming scenario the loss study is based on was not anticipated or included in the prior report, published in 2007."That suggests that these scenarios are evolving," Rosowsky said. "What is today's worst case scenario will likely become more probable in the IPCC's future reports if little action is taken to slow the effects of climate change."The increasing severity of hurricanes will also affect hurricane modeling, Rosowsky said, and consequent predictions of damage and financial loss. In a postscript to the paper, which will also be published as a chapter in a forthcoming book, Rosowsky cites the three catastrophic storms of the current hurricane season, Harvey, Irma and Maria, as examples of events so severe they will shift the assumptions about the likelihood that such severe hurricanes will occur in the future. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
October 10, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171010123834.htm | Stepped care beneficial after hurricanes | Stepped care is more effective than usual care in reducing the prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of hurricanes, according to a new study led by a Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researcher. | The study, published in "We expect that our findings will apply to areas hit by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate, and also human-made disasters, including acts of mass violence," said lead author Gregory Cohen, statistical analyst in the epidemiology department at BUSPH.In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the New York State Office of Mental Health provided crisis counseling and education sessions to an estimated 250,000 individuals between mid-November and late March 2014. A treatment modality called Skills for Psychological Recovery (SPR) -- a skills-building intervention to reduce stress and improve coping among survivors -- was used in the effort.However, studies have shown that PTSD prevalence in New York state remained high approximately 1 to 1.5 years after the storm. Moreover, more than half of those with perceived need for mental health services did not received such services. Similar patterns were observed following a variety of disasters, such the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.The authors argued that a potential reason for the persistence in mental health conditions, despite provision of usual care such as SPR, could be ascribed to the lack of effective triage to appropriate levels of care. Evidence suggests that a stepped care (SC) approach providing screening and triage is more effective and may provide greater reach for mental health care services. The approach has been recommended in the context of disasters but has not be tested on the field.The researchers used an agent-based model to simulate the stepped care approach for 2,642,713 agents using the sociodemographic characteristics derived from the American Community Survey estimates for New York City. Using an observational survey of residents of affected areas after Hurricane Sandy, the investigators estimated the initial distribution of the prevalence and exhibited PTSD symptoms to be 4.38 percent. They then simulated treatment scenarios starting four weeks following the landfall of Hurricane Sandy and ending two years later. Under the stepped care approach, individuals identified as PTSD cases were referred to cognitive behavioral therapists and non-cases were referred to SRP, while those receiving usual care were all referred to SRP.The study found that three to six months after the hurricane, stepped care delivered greater reach, treatment effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness than usual care when it came to hurricane-related PTSD. The authors cautioned that the SC model would still require substantial resources for deployment: $50.94 million to $101.87 million in the simulated scenario after Hurricane Sandy.In the absence of randomized trials, the authors wrote, the simulation results present the best evidence for establishing stepped care in the treatment of PTSD following large-scale disasters."These results provide further proof of concept for the SC approach to treating PTSD after a disaster, and they warrant further study and application in real-world settings," the authors wrote. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
October 5, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171005151140.htm | Interpreting hurricane forecast displays can be difficult for general public | The 2017 hurricane season has highlighted the critical need to communicate a storm's impact path and intensity accurately, but new research from the University of Utah shows significant misunderstandings of the two most commonly used storm forecast visualization methods. | The study, published by There are advantages and disadvantages to each technique, according to study co-authors Lace M. Padilla, Ian T. Ruginski and Sarah H. Creem-Regehr of the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah."Even though hurricane forecasts are costly and have a high impact on health and safety, there has been little research demonstrating how to depict forecast uncertainty to the general public effectively," said Padilla.In one experiment, the researchers showed participants either a summary display or an ensemble display with hurricane forecast data and asked them to interpret size and intensity of the storm on a hypothetical oil rig that was shown in different locations. Two additional experiments used only ensemble displays, showing oil rigs at different distances from the storm's center and either on or between forecast lines.Although the two types of displays used the same hurricane data, participants interpreted size and intensity differently. The researchers found summary displays were more likely to be misinterpreted than ensemble displays. The cone of uncertainty in a summary display, for example, depicts a hurricane's possible path, with no information about size, but study participants were likely to interpret the display as showing a storm growing in size and intensity.Ensemble displays are promising for high-level decisions such as regions to evacuate, but the researchers found that novice viewers' judgments are biased when their point of interest overlaps with a line in the ensemble. In the ensemble display experiment, participants were more likely to predict greater damage to an oil rig located on an ensemble line compared to one not falling on a line.This suggests that people may be more likely to evacuate or take precautionary actions if one of the lines in an ensemble overlaps with their own town, but feel relatively safe if not. This type of risk assessment is inaccurate because forecast scientists choose how many lines they want to show -- meaning that ensemble forecasts rarely show all the possible paths the hurricane could take.These findings matter because the visualization technique chosen can change what information people think is most important and affect decision making about mandatory evacuations and allocation of emergency management resources, the researchers said."There are pros and cons for each method of showing hurricane forecasts. That is why it is so important for the media to be informed about how the information they show can influence people's actions," said Padilla.The findings also have implications for media reports, since based on the type of images used, more context may be needed to help the public understand what they are seeing and what it means. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
October 5, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171005125028.htm | 12,000 years ago, Florida hurricanes heated up despite chilly seas | Category 5 hurricanes may have slammed Florida repeatedly during the chilly Younger Dryas, 12,000 years ago. The cause? Hurricane-suppressing effects of cooler sea surface were out-weighed by side effects of slowed ocean circulation. That's the finding of USGS researcher Michael Toomey and colleagues in their | As the last ice age waned, undersea landslide deposits called turbidites captured the fury of Florida's stormy days. Previously, Toomey linked turbidites in the Bahamas with modern hurricanes. For this study, the group examined turbidites in cores spanning the shift from the Younger Dryas into the warmer early Holocene, collected offshore the Dry Tortugas, Florida. The turbidites, complete with smashed up shells and jumbled sediments, reveal that in Younger Dryas days Florida was surprisingly hurricane-prone, at a time when cooler sea surface temperatures may have put the brakes on such intense storms elsewhere in the Atlantic.To explore why, Toomey and colleagues analyzed computer models that simulated ocean and atmospheric conditions near Florida during that period. In modern times, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) brings cool water south and warm water north. But during the Younger Dryas the AMOC is thought to have weakened considerably, slowing circulation and reshaping environmental conditions across much of the Northern Hemisphere.Modeling results indicated that lower sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, near Barbados, for example, corresponded with a drop in storm potential intensity. Near Florida, sea surfaces cooled as well. However, the change there was not as dramatic as further south or to the north. The relative warmth of waters offshore the southeastern U.S. compared to the regional Atlantic, explains Toomey, seems to have set the stage for intense hurricanes near Florida. "The modeling work suggests other factors, such as wind shear and humidity at mid-latitudes, outweighed changes in sea surface temperature at our core site," he says. Models and geologic records both show that by the early Holocene, as the AMOC regained strength, Florida's hurricanes subsided.The results, says Toomey, reveal that when it comes to generating hurricanes, ocean circulation plays a powerful role. What's more, he adds, the study demonstrates that on certain types of coastlines, turbidites have great potential for unraveling ancient hurricane histories. However, Toomey cautions against applying the results directly to future hurricane activity. He says for that, we need more field data and higher resolution models. "That's where I see this work headed next." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
October 4, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171004120435.htm | Hurricane exposes and washes away thousands of sea turtle nests | Hurricane Irma took a devastating toll on incubating sea turtle nests in the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most important loggerhead and green turtle nesting sites in the world, according to new estimates from the UCF Marine Turtle Research Group. | Researchers found significant dune erosion that swept away some nests and exposed the eggs of others. It was a record year for green turtle nesting along the refuge's beaches in southern Brevard County, but storm surge due to hurricane Irma destroyed many unhatched loggerhead and green turtle nests. University of Central Florida researchers estimate that of nests laid through the end of September, more than half of the season's green turtle nests and a quarter of loggerhead nests were lost.Both species are listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and Florida hosts the majority of both species' U.S. nests. The section of the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge monitored by UCF hosts about a third of the Florida's green turtle nests."Last year with Hurricane Matthew, we lucked out because it was a low green turtle year," said Kate Mansfield, assistant professor and director of the UCF Marine Turtle Research Group, noting that green turtles typically have alternating high and low nesting years. "This year was an extraordinarily exciting year for green turtle nesting, breaking all previous records within the refuge and continuing the conservation success story for the species. Unfortunately, we had another big hurricane this year, highlighting the need for continued conservation efforts in the area."Green turtles set a new record in 2017, laying 15,744 nests in the sands of the 13 miles of the Brevard County portion of the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge monitored by UCF. An estimated 8,830 of those were lost to the storm. Green turtles nest later in the season than other species, so many of their eggs hadn't hatched by the time Irma hit. Some 56 percent of total green nests were lost, an estimated 81 percent of those that were still incubating.Along the same stretch of beach, loggerheads laid 9,690 nests in 2017, but most had already hatched when Irma passed through the region. Still, an estimated 2,290 loggerhead nests were lost. That's 24 percent of the total loggerhead nests and 91 percent of those that were still incubating when hurricane-driven storm surge came ashore.The refuge is located at the northern extent of dense leatherback nesting in Florida, but the species nest in far fewer numbers, laying just 23 nests in 2017 within the portion of the refuge monitored by UCF. But they nest earlier than greens and loggerheads, and all of the leatherback nests had finished incubating before the hurricane.UCF also monitors another 16.4 miles of beaches north of the wildlife refuge, at Patrick Air Force Base and in central Brevard County. Considerably fewer nests are laid there than in the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, but the numbers are still high compared to many other parts of the country. On those beaches, an estimated 642 of 2,251 green turtle nests and 831 of 6,229 loggerhead nests were lost due to the hurricane.The UCF Marine Turtle Research Group also found evidence that some green turtle hatchlings have emerged since the hurricane. And some turtles have continued to come ashore and lay new nests. Within the wildlife refuge, 466 new green turtle nests and eight new loggerhead nests were laid in September following Irma. Along the other UCF-monitored beaches, 72 new green nests and three new loggerhead nests were laid.Still, the nests aren't out of danger."Green turtles are still nesting, but recent extremely high tides have likely wiped out many of those new nests, too," said Erin Seney, an assistant research scientist with the UCF group. "The good news is that the nesting habits of sea turtles do protect them from large-scale nest loss and make them more resilient to this kind of event. They lay multiple nests per nesting season, roughly every other year for 30 years or more."UCF researchers have run a sea turtle monitoring and research program on the beaches of the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge in southern Brevard County for 35 years. Their findings about sea turtle nesting activity are among the reasons the refuge was created in 1991. Last year, the university and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed a landmark agreement that formalized UCF's use of refuge facilities and established a protocol that will allow UCF to build research facilities and a plan that will give UCF oversight of the facilities for 40 years or more.UCF's portion of the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge (21 km) -- nest totals through Sept. 30Estimated Irma-related nest loss on UCF's portion of the Archie Carr National Wildlife RefugeUCF's "other beaches" (PAFB and Central Brevard -- combined 26.5 km) -- combined nest totals through Sept. 30Estimated Irma-related nest loss on PAFB+Central Brevard | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
September 26, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170926235922.htm | How has society adapted to hurricanes? A look at New Orleans over 300 years | In the midst of an intense hurricane season, a historical perspective published in | The flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina raised the question, how could such a disaster have happened in one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world? Looking into this question can shed light on how societies are dealing with such extreme events and whether they are going to be able to adapt to changing conditions in the future.Professor Eleonora Rohland, author of the historical perspective, notes that although lessons may be learned in the aftermath of disasters, these may be disrupted by changing political regimes or migration of parts of the population, which are no longer willing to adapt.The range of possible actions to hurricanes is limited to evacuation, large-scale engineering projects such as floodgates and dams, loss prevention (insurance), and the self- organization of society in recovery and rebuilding in the aftermath of a hurricane disaster. In retracing the evolution of these adaptation options and their entanglement with the history of science and technology, the article reveals the contingency involved in the development of hurricane knowledge and science."The historical long-term perspective reveals that we are at a watershed moment in human history right now: adaptation -- to climate change or increasing/stronger extreme events such as hurricanes -- has turned from a contingent and drawn out historical process into an imperative, a prescriptive policy, almost," said Prof. Rohland. "For current climate change adaptation research, it is worth looking into the historical record to take into account the cultural, societal, and political factors that hampered adaptation in the past in order to be prepared for the future. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
September 20, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170920114857.htm | 'Surfing robot' tracking water data as Harvey's rains flow toward fragile coral reefs | While you read this, an unmanned Wave Glider surface vehicle is riding swells alone in the Gulf of Mexico, collecting critically needed post-Hurricane Harvey water quality data. | Thanks to a Texas A&M University partnership with Liquid Robotics, the Wave Glider's manufacturer, researchers will use the glider's real-time data to examine how Harvey's record-breaking rainfall now flowing into the Gulf will affect water quality, coral reefs and ecosystems.Researchers call the approximately 11-trillion-gallons of freshwater flowing out of river deltas and into the Gulf the "freshwater plume." Unfortunately, it's potentially headed towards the fragile coral reefs in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, 100-miles off the Texas Coast.As of Sept. 14, Texas A&M Geochemical and Environmental Research Group (GERG) researchers reported the plume had spread about 30 miles from the coast.The freshwater plume's potential effects could be severe -- dangerously low salinity, harmful algal blooms and low oxygen levels could all result and cause major harm to the corals, as well as saltwater habitats, fish and other organisms throughout the affected Gulf area.Named the GERG, part of the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M, launched the Wave Glider from the The Texas A&M Chancellor's Research Initiative also had a hand in making this research possible; the Wave Glider was initially purchased by GERG with funding from the initiative. After Hurricane Harvey devastated the Texas coast, it became clear to GERG and Liquid Robotics that using an autonomous surface vehicle would be an efficient way to gather and report important real-time ocean data and understand the new impacts to the ecosystem."This research effort would not have happened without the support of Liquid Robotics," said Dr. Steve DiMarco, GERG"We are honored to assist Texas A&M on this historic mission to help oceanographers understand how parts of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem are impacted by Hurricane Harvey," added Mark Bindon, vice president of Mission Services at Liquid Robotics. "It's a great example of how Wave Gliders are augmenting traditional oceanographic tools to help scientists gain real time insights to the changing conditions of the Gulf and its tributaries."The researchers deployed the "We were tracking extremely low salinity values, very uncharacteristic for this time of year," DiMarco said."All of the freshwater that resulted from Hurricane Harvey is coming out of Galveston Bay, out of the Brazos, Trinity and Sabine rivers, and all of that flows out into the Gulf, then impacting the coastal environment," he added. Because such major in-flows are not typical in these parts of the Gulf from those watersheds, he said "this much freshwater flowing out there could impact the coastal environment tremendously," potentially causing low-oxygen conditions and harmful algal blooms.For the next 60 days, the "We are very pleased that we were able to respond so quickly to this event and with some of our new technology," said The research team is very concerned about the freshwater plume's potential negative impacts to the Flower Garden Banks."These are stunningly beautiful coral reefs that are just 100 miles south of Galveston," DiMarco said. "So the fear is that if that plume makes it all the way out there, it could impact the health of the coral there. They are open-ocean corals that are used to high salinities; having so much freshwater come through could stress those corals and lead to bleaching and mortality.""This could put the Flower Garden Banks in jeopardy," he said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
September 15, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170915095158.htm | New Orleans greenery post-Katrina reflects social demographics more than hurricane impact | Popular portrayals of "nature reclaiming civilization" in flood-damaged New Orleans, Louisianna, neighborhoods romanticize an urban ecology shaped by policy-driven socioecological disparities in redevelopment investment, ecologists argue in a new paper in the Ecological Society of America's open access journal | "Observers can be taken in by the post-apocalyptic image that some flood-damaged neighborhoods present over a decade after Katrina. It stimulates the imagination. But local people see it as a failure of public policy and a social problem," said lead author Joshua Lewis, a research professor at the ByWater Institute at Tulane University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. "For a community that has had thousands of people come back and struggle to rebuild, to reopen schools and churches, it's frustrating to see their neighborhoods portrayed as disintegrating or losing ground to nature."In a study of plant life across New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, the researchers were surprised to find that demographic factors of wealth, race, housing recovery, and land abandonment were better predictors of vegetation patterns than the degree of intensity of flooding and wind during the 2005 storm."A whole range of neighborhoods and demographics were hit by Katrina. They don't all have equal access to private capital and ability to navigate housing recovery programs, and that is what we see driving the type of vegetation emerging on these abandoned properties," said Lewis.In the wake of Katrina, many of New Orleans' damaged properties were never rebuilt. Though city and state agencies maintain some abandoned lots as close-clipped lawns, other lots have grown thickets of mostly non-native, opportunistic, or invasive species. The ecological utility of these unplanned green spaces has been noted. Cooling green canopies absorb stormwater and succor songbirds, for example.But abandoned land may also provide habitat for rats and mosquitoes, and the diseases they carry. These urban jungles can become dumping grounds for junk, harbor invasive species, and present a safety risk, especially for women. The social stigma of unmanaged "green blight" can depress redevelopment and thwart efforts to raise neighborhood prosperity and attract investment."New Orleans is a pretty heavily forested city, but the parks and managed green space aren't evenly distributed. The neighborhoods we're talking about had relatively low forest cover before Katrina. In hurricane-hit neighborhoods, we now have green space, but it's space that causes more problems than benefits for the people who live there," Lewis said.Lewis and colleagues examined eight neighborhoods, representing a cross-section of demographics and flooding severity, to learn how the current plant life of post-Katrina New Orleans reflects the flooding during the hurricane and post-disaster management. They looked at the age and size of trees and other plants, recording the composition of species at sample sites, conducting interviews, and developing a social database from census data and other metrics. From this data, they assessed the influence of the city's physical and social geography on regrowth.Neighborhoods with unmanaged growth do not necessarily have more trees, Lewis said, but they do have a lot of opportunistic and invasive trees and shrubs. The authors noted a striking contrast between the unmanaged plant pioneers dominating lots in the Lower 9"Some municipalities have figured out ways to maintain these lots, regardless of who owns them," said Lewis, noting that neighborhoods may have different mindsets around government intervention, and political tensions over land management are perennial.Lewis believes there are ways to transition some neglected lots into stormwater parks, utilizing them for green infrastructure interventions. But accomplishing that will require better knowledge of New Orleans' specific conditions, political will, and buy-in from skeptical residents who have seen past promises for green infrastructure projects unfulfilled, or worse, seen as an attempt at displacement of residents or neighborhood gentrification. . He also had a cautionary note for scientists conducting research in in cities that have endured environmental tragedies."Going in with the idea that the hurricane has created a clean slate for ecology -- in an urban setting, that is not the way to approach your research. Urban ecosystems are embedded in sociopolitical dynamics that shape the current conditions, and will continue to do so going forward," he said.Once emergent forests are established, mitigation requires cutting everything and replanting with native hardwoods and other native vegetation. Investments are being made, but biologists are several years away from figuring out how to make interventions that are affordable and easily maintained, Lewis said."Management and maintenance is the key problem. That's what we need to sort out here in New Orleans," Lewis said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
September 12, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170912170536.htm | Decade of data shows FEMA flood maps missed 3 in 4 claims | An analysis of flood claims in several southeast Houston suburbs from 1999-2009 found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency's 100-year flood plain maps -- the tool that U.S. officials use to determine both flood risk and insurance premiums -- failed to capture 75 percent of flood damages from five serious floods, none of which reached the threshold of a 100-year event. | The research by hydrologists and land-use experts at Rice University and Texas A&M University at Galveston was published in the journal "The takeaway from this study, which was borne out in Harvey, is that many losses occur in areas outside FEMA's 100-year flood plain," said study co-author Antonia Sebastian, a research associate at Rice's Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center and a postdoctoral researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands."What we've tried to show, both with this study and several others, is that it is possible to do better," said lead author Russell Blessing, a Texas A&M-Galveston graduate student with joint appointments at the SSPEED Center and Texas A&M-Galveston's Center for Texas Beaches and Shores. "There are innovative computational and hydrological tools available to build more predictive maps."In the new study, Blessing, Sebastian and co-author Sam Brody, a professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M-Galveston, director of the Center for Texas Beaches and Shores and a SSPEED Center investigator, examined the Armand Bayou watershed in southeast Harris County. Armand Bayou's 60-square-mile watershed includes portions of Houston, Pasadena, Deer Park, La Porte and Taylor Lake Village, as well as unincorporated portions of Harris County.Five major rain events occurred in the study area between 1999-2009. They were Hurricane Ike (2008), Tropical Storms Erin (2007) and Allison (2001, and two rainstorms that caused flooding in 2006 and 2009.Hydrologists often characterize rain events and flooding events with a statistic known as "return interval." A 100-year flood has a 100-year return interval, but Blessing said that does not mean such a storm is only expected to occur every 100 years. Rather, it means there is a 1-in-100 chance, or a 1 percent chance, that the event will occur in any given year. Thus, a 50-year event would have a 2 percent chance of occurring each year, a 10-year event would have a 10 percent chance, and so on.Brody said one problem with FEMA's 100-year flood plain maps is that they assume that flooding will only take place in one dimension, that is, either downstream or upstream, and not perpendicular to the channel."That assumption doesn't hold when you're in really low-lying areas, like Armand Bayou or other coastal watersheds that are very flat," he said. "When flooding rain accumulates in these areas, it can flow in just about any direction depending upon how high it gets."Another issue with FEMA's maps is their lack of granularity. Brody and Blessing said the type of soil (such as clay versus sand) and the way land is used (such as a concrete parking lot or a school playground) have significant impacts on flooding, and FEMA's models often use a single classification for entire neighborhoods or groups of neighborhoods. In so doing, they miss out on small-scale features that can significantly affect flooding.Sebastian said focusing on 100-year events is also problematic because short, intense rainfall events that don't meet the 100-year threshold can still cause serious flooding."In Armand Bayou, a 100-year rainfall event is one that drops 13.5 inches of rain in a 24-hour period," she said. "In reality, we also experience much more intense rainfalls in less time. So, for example, when it rains 6 inches in two or three hours, it can also cause serious flooding."In several other studies, including a number that examined flooding in the Clear Creek watershed, Blessing, Brody, Sebastian and SSPEED colleagues have shown that other approaches, like distributed hydrologic modeling and probabilistic flood plain mapping, can be far more predictive of flood damages and flood risk. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
September 7, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170907144617.htm | Extreme weather has limited effect on attitudes toward climate policies | People who recently experienced severe weather events such as floods, storms and drought are more likely to support policies to adapt to the effects of climate change, according to a new study co-authored by an Indiana University researcher. | But the relationship between exposure to extreme weather and support for climate policies is small, the study finds. And it fades quickly; a month after an extreme weather event, there was no effect."People respond to recent weather, whether it's temperature spikes, severe storms or other events," said David Konisky, an associate professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and an author of the study. "But the effects are small. Extreme weather is much less significant than other factors when it comes to attitudes about climate."A warming climate is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It seems to follow that experiencing extreme weather would make people more supportive of policies to adapt to climate change. The study suggests that may happen, but only for the short term and not to the extent that may have been expected.Konisky said the effect of experiencing extreme weather pales next to other factors that influence attitudes toward climate policies, such as one's political beliefs and party affiliation."People are pretty certain of where they stand on climate change, and extreme weather does not really move the needle much," he said.The researchers examined survey responses from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and correlated them with data from the National Weather Service's Storm Events Database. They focused on three policies for climate adaptation: restrictions on coastal development, limits on outdoor residential water use and regulation of stormwater runoff from residential property.All three policies enjoyed considerable support, but respondents who had experienced recent extreme weather expressed only modestly stronger support than other respondents.The researchers also looked for correlations between extreme weather events and support for policies to adapt to those particular events -- for example, coastal flooding and restrictions on coastal development. There too, they found only modest correlations.The study included a wide variety of severe weather events, Konisky said, and its findings may not entirely apply to headline-grabbing events like the Texas flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey or the threat to Florida by Hurricane Irma. But it suggests that even catastrophic weather may not change attitudes as much as many people expect. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
September 6, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170906114636.htm | Light-based method improves practicality and quality of remote wind measurements | Researchers have developed a new remote sensing instrument based on light detection and ranging (LIDAR) that could offer a simple and robust way to accurately measure wind speed. The detailed, real-time wind measurements could help scientists to better understand how hurricanes form and provide information that meteorologists can use to pinpoint landfall earlier, giving people more time to prepare and evacuate. | "As hurricane Harvey approached the U.S., hurricane hunters flew directly into the storm and dropped sensors to measure wind speed," said Xiankang Dou, leader of the research team at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). "Our Doppler LIDAR instrument can be used from a plane to remotely measure a hurricane's wind with high spatial and temporal resolutions. In the future, it could even make these measurements from aboard satellites."Wind measurements are also crucial for determining safe flying conditions, understanding how pollution moves through the air and efficiently operating wind turbines. Existing high-accuracy wind measurement technologies can be expensive and difficult to operate, leading to gaps in the application of these technologies in situations where they are most useful."We demonstrated a Doppler wind LIDAR with a simplified optical layout that also substantially enhances the system stability," said Dou. "Although specialists are typically needed to operate and maintain a sophisticated Doppler LIDAR, we are confident we can develop our approach into a system that will be as easy to use as a smartphone."In The Optical Society (OSA) journal One important application of LIDAR is in aeronautics, where it can be used on aircrafts or from a ground station to remotely measure air motion. With a vertical spatial resolution of 10 meters, the new system could measure small-scale wind phenomena such as wind shear and the wake turbulence created by an aircraft. A better understanding of these phenomena could improve flight safety and also increase airport capacity by optimizing the separation between aircraft during takeoff and landing.LIDAR is a remote sensing method that has been used to create high-resolution maps, scan the bottom of the ocean floor and to guide driverless cars. For measuring wind, a LIDAR system emits a laser pulse that propagates through the atmosphere where it interacts with molecules and aerosols. A small amount of the light scatters back towards the LIDAR instrument, where it is collected by a telescope. When wind causes air to move, this causes a Doppler shift that can be detected by the device.The researchers designed a dual frequency direct detection Doppler wind LIDAR that used a laser emitting 1.5-micron light. Because this wavelength is commonly used in optical communications networks, they were able to build the system using commercially available fiber-optic components, each combining several light-controlling components into a single device. The all fiber construction of the LiDAR system is therefore robust against vibrations and rough operation handling.Compared to previously developed systems, the new simplified design makes it much easier to configure and align each component, increases stability and lowers the amount of light lost within the system. The new system also requires no calibration after it is initialized and requires no special eye protection."For LIDAR systems that will be operated full-time in the field, eye safety is an important consideration," said Haiyun Xia, the principle investigator of the Quantum Lidar Laboratory at USTC. "Fortunately, the 1.5-micron laser we used exhibits the highest permissible exposure for eye safety in the wavelength range from 0.3 to 10 microns."The 1.5-micron wavelength is also ideal for atmospheric wind sensing from satellites because, compared to UV and visible wavelengths, it shows less susceptibility to atmospheric disturbance and optical contamination from the sun and other sources. Satellite-based wind measurements are used for weather forecasts and meteorological studies. "Space-borne Doppler wind LIDAR is now regarded as the most promising way to meet the need for global wind data requirements and to fill gaps in the wind data provided by other methods," said Xia.The optical setup for the new Doppler wind LIDAR contains just one laser source, one detector and a single-channel Fabry-Perot interferometer that converts the Doppler shift into photon number variations of the backscatter signals. Using a Fabry-Perot interferometer made of optical fibers rather than one consisting of many individual optical components made the system robust and stable enough to use in harsh environments such as aboard aircraft or satellites.The new system also includes one of the fastest detectors available for single photon counting, a superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD). This detector improved the LIDAR's performance compared to the InGaAs avalanche photodiodes typically used to detect 1.5-micron light."The high detection efficiency and low dark count rate of the SNSPD means that the weak signal from the backscattered light can be detected with a high signal-to-noise ratio," said Xia. "Another attractive feature of the SNSPD is its high maximum count rate, which helps avoid detector saturation."The researchers tested their system by first examining its stability after calibration. Overall, the system's measurements varied by less than 0.2 meters per second over 10 days in the lab. They then tested the system outdoors and compared its horizontal wind measurements with measurements from an ultrasonic wind sensor, a non-remote system for measuring wind. On average, the LIDAR measurements were within 0.1 meters per second and 1 degrees for wind speed and direction, respectively.The researchers are now working to improve the spatial resolution of the Doppler wind LIDAR system and want to make it even more practical to use in the field. They have also founded a company to further develop the system and plan to have a commercial version available next year. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
August 29, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170829093142.htm | Flood-damaged documents, books may be salvageable with electron beam technology | Documents, books and similar items soaked and muddied in the potentially sewage-laden flood waters produced by Hurricane Harvey may be salvageable with the use of electronic beam technology. | "This technology has been used around the world to save documents and paintings that otherwise would be lost," said Dr. Suresh Pillai, director of the National Center for Electron Beam Research, part of Texas A&M AgriLife Research, College Station.Pillai said the technology is useful for killing mold, fungus and bacteria that invade moist environments. Irradiation has been used worldwide to save documents such as ancient Orthodox Christian icons in Romania, cultural artifacts in Brazil and religious sculptures in France.The same technology could be used on items damaged by Hurricane Harvey flood waters, such as passports, birth, marriage or death certificates, and books, Pillai said."In the case where a library has been destroyed, all of the books -- especially those that are out of print or rare -- may not have to be thrown away," he said.He said the method has been shown by other researchers around the world that it does not harm the document if the appropriate dose is delivered."The technology uses electrons from commercial electricity, which are accelerated to break the DNA of the fungal spores and bacterial cells. That destroys the pathogen but not the material," Pillai explained.The electron beam center normally works with foods to keep them safe for human and animal consumption. The technology also can be used to treat water to remove pathogens and other organic pollutants. But the center has worked on documents in the past."An army base in Texas had some maps that were water damaged, and so we worked to help save them," Pillai recalled.The key is an optimal dose to destroy the possible pathogens from sewage-contaminated flood waters but not the material, he said, but there is no single "recipe" to use for all documents.That's where the research part of the center is vital. Pillai said each project is evaluated to determine the optimal dose to irradiate a particular document. The determination may include the thickness of the item and whether it is colored, for example.A plan would be made for each item to determine the appropriate treatment. The cost for the service has not been determined yet and could vary on the project, Pillai said.Pillai said waterlogged items could harbor sewage-related pathogens and therefore people should not attempt to clean items first. Rather, let the item dry out before considering electron beam decontamination and preservation. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
August 28, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170828093751.htm | After Hurricane Katrina, personal debt fell for those worst hit, but at a cost | After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans a dozen years ago, there was a sharp and immediate drop in personal debt among residents living in city's most flooded blocks, according to a new Case Western Reserve University study. | Yet, the main driver of this debt reduction -- using flood insurance to pay off mortgages of damaged homes, rather than rebuilding or repairing them -- may ultimately harm the city's recovery, the study suggests."While paying down mortgage debt is usually seen as a positive, if homeowners do this and move, then it could slow the rebuilding of neighborhoods -- especially if residents are more likely to return when others do," said Justin Gallagher, an assistant professor of economics and co-author of the study, published this month in the New Orleans residents with local mortgage lenders were more likely to rebuild their homes -- a buoy to neighborhoods.But the propensity to pay off mortgages -- and not rebuild -- was especially high in the deepest-flooded neighborhoods."Residents in these areas were the ones facing the difficult decision to rebuild or pay down debt," said Gallagher. "And residents in these areas with non-local mortgage companies were much more likely to choose to decrease debt than rebuild." In many cases, lenders must approve how homeowners use flood insurance payouts and can create conditions and pressures for how the money is spent."The findings suggest that the higher number of mortgages provided by local lenders can result in a more positive impact on a community's redevelopment after a natural disaster," Gallagher said.After Katrina, new mortgages by nonlocal lenders fell sharply, relative to those by local lenders.Causing an estimated $108 billion in property damage, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005 and flooded 85 percent of the city after its levees were breached by a surge of storm and coastal waters.In the U.S., more than 200 weather and climate disasters have exceeded $1 billion in damages since 1980, with a total cost exceeding $1.2 trillion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Yet, relatively little is known about how people affected by natural disasters cope with the resulting financial shock, said Gallagher, though the U.S. government has many longstanding programs to do so.After Katrina, researchers found that the worst-flooded residents relied on credit cards in modest amounts -- incurring an average temporary increase of 15 percent, or $500, in new credit card debt. (Though, there was some evidence of a tightening overall credit market for flooded residents.)In addition, two broad measures of financial health -- debt delinquency rates and credit scores -- showed short-lived and modest increases: The worst-flooded residents had 90-day delinquency rates that were about 10 percent higher, relative to non-flooded residents, for the three months following Katrina. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
August 7, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170807155203.htm | Some land conservation measures unpopular among property owners | While popular with conservation groups, coastal easements that prevent development in order to protect marshland from changes brought about by climate change and rising sea levels are not favored by property owners, according to a new study by the University of Connecticut and Virginia Tech. | The findings, based on the results of surveys conducted in 2015 of 1,002 owners of Connecticut coastal properties, suggest that relying on education about sea level rise and the ecosystem benefits of marshes alone will not protect land from future changes. Since private landowners are critical partners in efforts to save coastal marshes, identifying the best strategies will be essential to success.The study, conducted by Christopher Field and Chris Elphick of UConn and Ashley Dayer of Virginia Tech, followed two major storms -- Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 -- providing a valid measure of whether experience influences attitudes about taking action to lessen future risks.Landowners in the study indicated skepticism about granting easements based on concerns as to whether they will be offered a fair price in exchange for keeping land as open space where marshes can migrate as seas rise. They also indicated worry that environmental organizations "might not act fairly or transparently in their efforts to encourage tidal marsh migration," the researchers write in an article published in the Aug. 7 issue of the In the study area alone -- the Connecticut coast -- there are an estimated 30,000 landowners in the zone projected to become tidal marsh by 2100, and millions of people globally live near tidal marshes. Whether they decide to leave room for marshes to move inland or instead build seawalls that harden shorelines means the difference between saving tidal wetlands and their many ecological, economic, and recreational benefits, or losing them altogether.While surveyed landowners whose properties flooded during the hurricane were 1.4 times more likely to say they may be willing to sell their vulnerable land outright, the real world results call those stated intentions into question. Federal buyout programs after both hurricanes acquired fewer than 100 properties in the study area, although many more were eligible, the study states.If land protection agreements with nonprofits and government agencies aren't the answer, what offers greater promise for the future of marshes?Surveyed landowners responded favorably to the idea of restrictive covenants, even though they typically do not include financial incentives. Under restrictive covenants, an entire neighborhood agrees to forgo building seawalls and other shoreline armoring structures. However, note the researchers, these strategies tend to be counterproductive in the long run, because they divert erosion and flooding to adjoining properties.Coastal landowners also liked the notion of future interest agreements. Under these programs, private landowners agree to accept the fair market value of their property at the time of signing if future flooding reduces the value by more than half. That future flooding would mean dry upland has been allowed to turn into coastal marsh.The study was funded by Connecticut Sea Grant, UConn, and the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Field is a postdoctoral fellow in the UConn Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Elphick is an associate professor of conservation biology in the UConn ecology and evolutionary biology department and the Center of Biological Risk; and Dayer is assistant professor of human dimensions at Virginia Tech's College of Natural Resources and Environment.The article, "Landowner behavior can determine the success of conservation strategies for ecosystem migration under sea-level rise," offers broad implications for how to best design programs to mitigate other climate change effects. But further analysis is needed, say the researchers. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
July 20, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170720095103.htm | Shifting storms to bring extreme waves, seaside damage to once placid areas | The world's most extensive study of a major stormfront striking the coast has revealed a previously unrecognised danger from climate change: as storm patterns fluctuate, waterfront areas once thought safe are likely to be hammered and damaged as never before. | The study, led by engineers at University of New South Wales in Sydney, was published in the latest issue of the Nature journal "If you have waterfront property or infrastructure that has previously been sheltered from the impacts of extreme waves, this is worrying news" said Mitchell Harley, lead author and a senior research associate at UNSW's Water Research Laboratory (WRL). "What this study confirms, is that simply by changing direction, storms can be many times more devastating. And that's what we're facing in many locations as the climate continues to change."Ian Turner, director of WRL and a co-author, said sea level rise was no longer the only factor at play when preparing for the impact of climate change on waterfront areas. "Shifts in storm patterns and wave direction will also have major consequences, because they distort and amplify the natural variability of coastal patterns."The study relied on data collected during the June 2016 'superstorm' that battered eastern Australia, one of the fiercest in decades; it inundated towns, smashed buildings, swept away cars and infrastructure and triggered hundreds of evacuations across a 3,000 km swathe from Queensland in the north all the way to Tasmania in the south. Three people died and there were more than 80 rescues from stranded cars.A week before the storm hit, and for many weeks afterwards, the researchers used a fleet of drones, floating sensor buoys, aircraft fitted with LiDAR laser ranging sensors, fixed cameras on buildings and quadbikes and jetskis fitted with real-time satellite positioning across a 200 km swathe of the eastern seaboard. This produced the largest and most detailed pre- and post-storm coastline analysis ever done.They found that 11.5 million cubic metres of sand was eroded from beaches across a 200 km stretch of Australia's eastern seaboard in just the three days of the storm -- the equivalent to filling the Melbourne Cricket Ground (capacity 100,000 people) to the brim with sand more than seven times.This was similar to the amount of sand shifted on the U.S. east coast by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, which killed 233 people and caused US$75 billion in damage.It is the damaging power of wave energy -- and the disruption of long-established storm patterns due to climate change -- that present a new danger. The June 2016 'superstorm' that devastated Australia's east coast was only moderately intense, equivalent to a 1-in-5 year event: however, it did hit from the highly unusual easterly direction."And that's what's really worrying," said Turner. "The damage we saw from a moderately intense storm last year is a harbinger of what's to come," said Turner. "Climate change is not only raising the oceans and threatening foreshores, but making our coastlines much more vulnerable as the direction of incoming storms change."We need to be prepared," he added. "Not just for the fact that what we consider as 'king tides' will be the norm within decades, but that the storms that strike the coast will come from unexpected directions, damaging coastal areas and infrastructure once thought safe from storm damage."Previous studies have estimated that sea level rise from climate change -- of between 40 cm and 1 metre over the next century -- could put $226 billion of infrastructure at risk in Australia alone. This includes road and rail, commercial and residential buildings and even light industrial buildings. But also threatened are 75 hospitals and health centres, 258 police, fire and ambulance stations, five power stations and 41 waste disposal facilities."When it comes to severe weather, a lot of the attention is paid to tropical storms like cyclones and hurricanes," said Harley. "But this data highlights the amount of coastal damage that can occur with east-coast lows in Australia. Despite creating near hurricane-force winds, intense rain and large ocean waves of up to 9 meters, they are less worrisome to many people."Narrabeen Beach in Sydney experienced the most erosion seen in 40 years of monitoring -- and 36% greater than the second-most erosive event in May 1997. But it was not the worst affected: "Although a swimming pool at Narrabeen became the iconic image of the June 2016 storm, the greatest erosion was actually seen at Nine Mile Beach, an unpopulated area just north of Forster," added Harley. "And that was due to a localised focusing of wave energy."Coupled with a vast bank of data collected over the past 40 years at Narrabeen-Collaroy beaches -- one of the world's longest-running beach erosion monitoring programs -- coastal engineers now have enough information to build models that can accurately predict the damage storms would do days before an event.It would also provide a crucial insight into how climate change will interact with the long cycles of El Niño and La Niña, and predict coastal vulnerability from sea level rise and changing storm patterns in the decades ahead, said senior lecturer Kristen Splinter, an engineer and modelling specialist at WRL who deep-dives into the data to build predictive tools.And not just for Australia, but for the world. "With this data, we can now construct accurate coastal erosion models, to predict damage days before a storm hits," said Splinter. "It will also be pivotal in understanding the future effect of climate change on coastal variability around the world."Turner agreed: "This isn't just about protecting beaches: billions of dollars' worth of city infrastructure around the world is threatened by coastal erosion: buildings, roads, power and water utility corridors, sewerage lines -- and this will only worsen as sea levels rise, causing storm tides to do more damage and reach deeper inland." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
July 7, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170707133824.htm | Extreme coastal sea levels more likely to occur, new data, advanced modeling techniques suggest | Improving projections for how much ocean levels may change in the future and what that means for coastal communities has vexed researchers studying sea level rise for years, but a new international study that incorporates extreme events may have just given researchers and coastal planners what they need. | The study, published in "Storm surges globally lead to considerable loss of life and billions of dollars of damages each year, and yet we still have a limited understanding of the likelihood and associated uncertainties of these extreme events both today and in the future," said Thomas Wahl, an assistant engineering professor in the University of Central Florida who led the study. He is also a member of UCF's Sustainable Coastal Systems Cluster.The study was conducted to make data about extreme events a part of the ongoing research and planning required to help communities prepare now for conditions that may be dramatically different in the not-too-distant future.Extreme sea levels are typically caused by a combination of high tides, storm surges, and in many cases waves, Wahl said.When an extreme event collides with continually rising seas, it takes a less intense storm, such as a Category I hurricane, to inflict as much coastal damage as a Category II or III storm would have had when the seas were lower.Because of the rising sea levels, which research has confirmed has occurred steadily during the past century and is expected to accelerate in the future, extreme events that are now expected to happen, on average, only once every hundred years, could occur every decade or even every year, in many places by 2050, the study said.Using a representative sample of 20 different methods for predicting extreme sea levels the researchers focused intensely on the measures of uncertainty that accompany any prediction, but that are particularly vexing in the analysis of extremes.Interspersing sea level rise with the latest predictions of extreme sea level events, the research team was able to illustrate the dramatic effect one has on the other and pinpoint regions of the world that are especially threatened."In order to understand coastal impacts under current and future climate and socio-economic conditions, we do not only need robust projections of mean sea level rise but also a profound knowledge of present-day and future extreme sea levels, because these events drive the impacts," Wahl said.The researcher team agreed that including extreme sea levels into coastal impact studies is imperative in helping vulnerable parts of the world effectively protect themselves by adapting through new or upgraded infrastructure such as dikes, pumping systems, barriers, or other tools like new building codes or flood zoning that prevents new infrastructure from being built in high-risk areas."Based on our results we can see, for the first time globally, what role uncertainties in extreme sea level predictions play," said study co-author and associate professor Ivan Haigh of the University of Southampton, UK. "It helps identify hotspots where we can focus on in more detail, performing localized studies to reduce the uncertainties and improve our confidence in the results." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
June 8, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170608073356.htm | Sahara greening may intensify tropical cyclone activity worldwide | Future climate warming could lead to a re-greening of the southernmost Sahara (Sahel), with decreased dust emissions and changes in land cover. In a recent study, researchers at the Department of Meteorology at Stockholm University have found that tropical cyclone activity may have increased during past warm climates in connection with a greening of the Sahara. | Tropical cyclones can have devastating effects, with costly damages and loss of human lives. In the Department of Meteorology at Stockholm University (MISU), researchers have done a series of model simulations investigating tropical cyclone activity during an earlier warm climate, the mid-Holocene, 6,000 years ago. The now hyper-arid Sahara desert was characterized by a lush extent of grass and consequently reduced dust emission due to changes in Earth's orbital parameters. Such changes in the orbital forcing led to much stronger summer insolation in the Northern Hemisphere and consequently to stronger monsoons.Earlier studies on the sensitivity of tropical cyclones to past climates have only analyzed the effect of changes in the solar radiation from orbital forcing on the formation of tropical cyclones, without considering the feedbacks associated to the consequent greening of the Sahara."Our results show that a greening of the Sahara with reduced dust loadings lead to more favorable conditions for tropical cyclone development," says Francesco S.R. Pausata, researcher at the Department of Meteorology, Stockholm University.The greening of Sahara strengthens the West African Monsoon, which triggers a change in the atmospheric circulation over the entire tropics, affecting tropical cyclone activity."It is of paramount importance to account for changes in Saharan vegetation and dust emissions when simulating past climate change. Therefore, also changes in land cover should be represented in climate models for projections of future climate," concludes Francesco S.R. Pausata.The article has been published in the scientific journal | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
June 7, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170607085339.htm | Offshore wind turbines vulnerable to Category 5 hurricane gusts | Offshore wind turbines built according to current standards may not be able to withstand the powerful gusts of a Category 5 hurricane, creating potential risk for any such turbines built in hurricane-prone areas, new University of Colorado Boulder-led research shows. | The study, which was conducted in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, highlights the limitations of current turbine design and could provide guidance for manufacturers and engineers looking to build more hurricane-resilient turbines in the future.Offshore wind-energy development in the U.S. has ramped up in recent years, with projects either under consideration or already underway in most Atlantic coastal states from Maine to the Carolinas, as well as the West Coast and Great Lakes. The country's first utility-scale offshore wind farm, consisting of five turbines, began commercial operation in December 2016 off the coast of Rhode Island.Turbine design standards are governed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). For offshore turbines, no specific guidelines for hurricane-force winds exist. Offshore turbines can be built larger than land-based turbines, however, owing to a manufacturer's ability to transport larger molded components such as blades via freighter rather than over land by rail or truck.For the study, CU Boulder researchers set out to test the limits of the existing design standard. Due to a lack of observational data across the height of a wind turbine, they instead used large-eddy simulations to create a powerful hurricane with a computer."We wanted to understand the worst-case scenario for offshore wind turbines, and for hurricanes, that's a Category 5," said Rochelle Worsnop, a graduate researcher in CU Boulder's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) and lead author of the study.These uniquely high-resolution simulations showed that under Category 5 conditions, mean wind speeds near the storm's eyewall reached 90 meters-per-second, well in excess of the 50 meters-per-second threshold set by current standards."Wind speeds of this magnitude have been observed in hurricanes before, but in only a few cases, and these observations are often questioned because of the hazardous conditions and limitations of instruments," said George Bryan of NCAR and a co-author of the study. "By using large-eddy simulations, we are able to show how such winds can develop and where they occur within hurricanes."Furthermore, current standards do not account for veer, a measure of the change in wind direction across a vertical span. In the simulation, wind direction changed by as much as 55 degrees between the tip of the rotor and its hub, creating a potentially dangerous strain on the blade.The findings could be used to help wind farm developers improve design standards as well as to help stakeholders make informed decisions about the costs, benefits and risks of placing turbines in hurricane-prone areas."The study will help inform design choices before offshore wind energy development ramps up in hurricane-prone regions," said Worsnop, who received funding from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program to conduct this research. "We hope that this research will aid wind turbine manufacturers and developers in successfully tapping into the incredibly powerful wind resource just beyond our coastlines.""Success could mean either building turbines that can survive these extreme conditions, or by understanding the overall risk so that risks can be mitigated, perhaps with financial instruments like insurance," said Professor Julie Lundquist of ATOC and CU Boulder's Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI), a co-author of the study. "The next stage of this work would be to assess how often these extreme winds would impact an offshore wind farm on the Atlantic coast over the 20-to-30-year lifetime of a typical wind farm."The findings were recently published online in the journal | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
June 1, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170601124426.htm | 2017 hurricane season follows year of extremes | The 2016 Hurricane Season is the longest hurricane season since 1951, making the 2016 season the 2nd longest on record. That's the conclusion drawn in a paper just published in | Lead author Jennifer Collins, PhD, associate professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL, writes "Overall 2016 was notable for a series of extremes, some rarely and a few never before observed in the Atlantic basin, a potential harbinger of seasons to come in the face of ongoing global climate change.""The 2016 North Atlantic Hurricane Season: A season of Extremes" examines 15 tropical storms, seven hurricanes and three intense hurricanes. The season was slightly above average when considering Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE), which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) uses to measure cyclonic activity.Hurricane Alex started the 2016 season in January, causing minor damage in the Azores. The season ended 318 days later in late November when Otto made landfall over southern Central America. Otto was record-breaking in location and intensity being a high-end Category 2 storm.In October, Hurricane Matthew became a Category 5 at the southernmost latitude on record for the North Atlantic Ocean. It was the first Category 5 in almost a decade and ended the longest stretch without one since 1950. Matthew claimed more than 600 lives, mainly in Haiti, and caused $15 billion in damage.Up until that point, conditions had been extremely dry. A dramatic change in relative humidity lead to the month generating more than 50% of the season's ACE. It's also the first October to have two Category 4 or stronger storms. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
May 18, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170518083034.htm | Measuring the human impact of weather | The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has announced today world records for the highest reported historical death tolls from tropical cyclones, tornadoes, lightning and hailstorms. It marks the first time the official WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes has broadened its scope from strictly temperature and weather records to address the impacts of specific events. | "In today's world, it seems like the latest weather disaster is the worst," said Randy Cerveny, an Arizona State University professor of geographical science and urban planning and chief Rapporteur of Climate and Weather Extremes for WMO. Cerveny is the keeper of the world's weather extremes."Knowing exactly how bad various types of weather have been in the past has been an integral part of preparing for the future," Cerveny added. "For example, I have often heard since 2005 that Hurricane Katrina was the deadliest tropical cyclone/hurricane to have ever occurred. While Katrina was bad (more than 2,000 died), it pales in comparison to the tropical cyclone that hit the area of present-day Bangladesh in 1970, that killed an estimated 300,000 people.""This type of extreme (mortality totals) provides a very useful set of baseline numbers against which future disasters can be compared," Cerveny said."Extreme weather causes serious destruction and major loss of life," added WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. "That is one of the reasons behind the WMO's efforts to improve early warnings of multiple hazards and impact-based forecasting, and to learn lessons gleaned from historical disasters to prevent future ones. The human aspect inherent in extreme events should never be lost."Cerveny convened an international WMO committee of 19 experts that conducted an in-depth investigation of documented mortality records for five specific weather-related events. The committee's findings are:"These events highlight the deadly tragedies associated with different types of weather," explained Cerveny. "Detailed knowledge of these historical extremes confirm our continuing responsibilities to not only forecast and monitor weather and climate but to utilize that information to save lives around the world so disasters of these types are lessened or even eliminated in the future."Cerveny said more event impacts could be added in the future for such weather-related events as floods and heat waves."I think that many people are unaware of exactly how dangerous certain types of weather can be," Cerveny added. "The more that we are aware of the dangers, hopefully the less likely we will see repeats of these types of disasters."A full list of weather and climate extremes is available at the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes ( | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
May 16, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170516090856.htm | How atmospheric waves radiate out of hurricanes | Researchers believe they have found a new way to monitor the intensity and location of hurricanes from hundreds of miles away by detecting atmospheric waves radiating from the centers of these powerful storms. | In a new study, scientists from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) presented direct observations of the waves, obtained by NOAA aircraft flying in hurricanes and by a research buoy located in the Pacific Ocean. The waves, known as atmospheric gravity waves, are produced by strong thunderstorms near the eye and radiate outward in expanding spirals."These very subtle waves can sometimes be seen in satellite images," said David Nolan, professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and lead author of the study. "We were able to measure them in aircraft data and surface instruments."In addition, says Nolan, computer simulations performed at the UM Center for Computational Science can reproduce the waves, showing that the wave strengths can be related to the maximum wind speed in the core of the storm. These findings suggest that hurricanes and typhoons could be monitored from hundreds of miles away with relatively inexpensive instruments, such as barometers and anemometers, much like earthquakes from around the world are monitored by seismometers.The researchers analyzed data obtained from 25 different penetrations by NOAA P3 aircraft into five hurricanes in 2003 and 2004, as well as data from the Extreme Air-Sea Interaction (EASI) buoy deployed in the Pacific Ocean by UM Rosenstiel School scientists in 2010."The waves cause very weak upward and downward motions, which are recorded by the NOAA P3 as it flies through the storm," said Jun Zhang of the Hurricane Research Division, a veteran of many hurricane flights. "But we were surprised at how clearly the waves could be detected at the surface.""Of course, hurricanes are very well observed by satellites. But these waves can reveal processes occurring in the eyewall of a hurricane that are obscured from the view of satellites by thick clouds," said Nolan. "Any additional measurements, even if they provide similar information as satellites, can lead to better forecasts."Typhoon Meranti GW Animation VIDEO: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
May 11, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170511165345.htm | Migratory seabird deaths linked to hurricanes | Stronger and more frequent hurricanes may pose a new threat to the sooty tern, an iconic species of migratory seabird found throughout the Caribbean and Mid-Atlantic, a new Duke University-led study reveals. | The study, published this week in the peer-reviewed open-access journal "The route the birds take and that most Atlantic-forming hurricanes take is basically the same, only in reverse," said Ryan Huang, a doctoral student at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, who led the study. "That means these birds, who are usually very tired from traveling long distances over water without rest, are flying head-on into some of the strongest winds on the planet.""This is worrying because we know that as Earth's climate changes, we expect to see more frequent and powerful hurricanes in the future -- meaning that the chances of sooty terns being hit by storms will likely go up," Huang said.Hurricane season typically lasts from June to November, with peak activity occurring in August and September.A new map produced by the research shows that sooty terns leave their breeding colony at Dry Tortugas National Park in the Florida Keys each June as hurricane season starts. They migrate southward and eastward across the Caribbean through summer and early fall, before skirting the northern coast of South America and arriving at their winter habitat off the Atlantic coast of Brazil in November.Huang and his colleagues charted the migratory path by recording and mapping the dates and locations of all sooty terns banded for study at the Dry Tortugas since the 1950s but found dead elsewhere. They also mapped locational data retrieved from birds that were fitted with satellite-telemetry tracking tags. When they overlaid all this data with maps of hurricane paths from the same period, they discovered a striking correlation."While it's impossible to say just how many of the birds died as a direct result of the hurricanes, we saw a strong relationship between the numbers and locations of bird deaths and the numbers and locations of hurricanes," said Stuart L. Pimm, the Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke's Nicholas School."What's really interesting is that it's not just the big category 4 and 5 storms that can kill large numbers of birds. A series of smaller, weaker storms may have the same impact as that of a single large, strong storm," Pimm noted. "In September 1973, Tropical Storm Delia, a small storm in the Gulf of Mexico, killed a lot of birds because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time."Although sooty terns are neither rare nor endangered -- 80,000 or more of them are estimated to breed in the Dry Tortugas each year -- they have long been used by scientists as an indicator species to determine the health of the region's marine environment."If there are changes taking place in the ocean, you'll see corresponding changes taking place in the health of these tern populations, among other indicator species," Huang said. "That's what makes our findings somewhat concerning. If these birds are experiencing negative effects from changing ocean conditions, they are unlikely to be the only species affected." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
April 17, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170417115236.htm | Migration from sea-level rise could reshape cities inland | When Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, cities inland saw an influx of evacuees escaping the storm and its aftermath. Now, a new University of Georgia study predicts that this could happen again as a result of sea-level rise. | In a paper published in The study is the first attempt to model the destination of millions of potentially displaced migrants from heavily populated coastal communities."We typically think about sea level rise as a coastal issue, but if people are forced to move because their houses become inundated, the migration could affect many landlocked communities as well," said the study's lead author, Mathew Hauer, who completed his doctoral degree in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of geography.While sea-level rise assessments are numerous and may help plan for the development of critical infrastructure, few research studies have grappled with where displaced people and families will go. No previous studies model how migration caused by sea-level rise will affect population other than in the directly affected coastal areas.Relationships between environmental stressors and migration are highly complex, as responses range from short-term, temporary migration to permanent, long-distance migration. Sea-level rise is a unique environmental stressor because it permanently converts habitable land to uninhabitable water.The new study combines estimates of populations at risk from sea-level rise within a migrations systems simulation to estimate both the number and destinations of potential sea-level rise migrations in the U.S. over the coming century."Some of the anticipated landlocked destinations, such as Las Vegas, Atlanta and Riverside, California, already struggle with water management or growth management challenges," Hauer said. "Incorporating accommodation strategies in strategic long-range planning could help alleviate the potential future intensification of these challenges." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
February 23, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170223092409.htm | Study targets warm water rings that fuel hurricane intensification in the Caribbean Sea | Last year's devastating category-5 hurricane -- Matthew -- may be one of many past examples of a tropical storm fueled by massive rings of warm water that exist in the upper reaches of the Caribbean Sea. | In a study conducted in the region two years prior to when Matthew's trekked across the Caribbean Sea, the research team in the Upper Ocean Dynamics Laboratory at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science deployed 55 aircraft ocean instruments from the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration's WP-3D aircraft. The purpose of the scientific mission was to measure ocean temperature, salinity, and currents to understand the structure of these warm-water eddies.The science team obtained vital information about the physical characteristics within one large warm-water eddy, which likely originated from the North Brazil Current, and analyzed its potential influence on sub-surface ocean conditions during the passage of tropical cyclones.When analyzing the data, they found a barrier layer, an upper ocean feature created by the Amazon-Orinoco freshwater river outflow, that makes mixing in the upper ocean waters less efficient during wind events. This feature, and the fact that warm ocean eddies are known to assist in the intensification of hurricanes due to deep warm thermal layers, lead the researchers to theorize that the barrier layer within a warm ocean eddy may result in an even more favorable upper ocean environment for hurricane intensification."Our study is important because tropical cyclone intensity forecasts for several past hurricanes over the Caribbean Sea have under-predicted rapid intensification events over warm oceanic features," said Johna Rudzin, a PhD student at the UM Rosenstiel School and lead author of the study.Tropical storms receive energy from their surrounding ocean waters. As a storm moves across the water, it may interact with rings of warm water known as eddies. As the storm moves forward over these eddies, the warm ocean waters below help fuel the storm's intensity through enhanced and sustained heat and moisture fluxes.Similar warm ocean eddies exist in the Gulf of Mexico, a result of their separation from the warm-water Loop Current, are also of interest to the research team involved in this study.Last year, Hurricane Matthew rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to hurricane status as it moved over the Caribbean Sea in the location where a warm ocean eddy exists, and in close proximity to where these measurements were taken for this study two years prior. Matthew continued to intensify to a category-5 storm and into one of the strongest in Atlantic basin history, which made landfall and devastated portions of Haiti, Cuba, and the eastern United States.According to the researchers, to better understand if Matthew's intensification was aided by the warm-water eddies and the residing barrier layer in the Caribbean Sea's upper ocean, more ambient and in-storm upper ocean observations in this basin are needed to improve forecast models for the region. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
February 15, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170215092858.htm | Extreme waves caught with higher-resolution modeling | Surfers aren't the only people trying to catch big waves. Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are trying to do so, too, at least in wave climate forecasts. | Using decades of global climate data generated at a spatial resolution of about 25 kilometers squared, researchers were able to capture the formation of tropical cyclones, also referred to as hurricanes and typhoons, and the extreme waves that they generate. Those same models, when run at resolutions of about 100 kilometers, missed the tropical cyclones and the big waves up to 30 meters high.Their findings, published in the Feb. 16 issue of "It's well known that to study tropical cyclones using simulations, the models need to be run at high resolution," said study lead author and postdoctoral fellow Ben Timmermans. "The majority of existing models used to study the global climate are run at resolutions that are insufficient to predict tropical cyclones. The simulations in our study are the first long-duration global data sets to use a resolution of 25 kilometers. It's also the first time a study has specifically examined the impact of resolution increase for ocean waves at a global climatological scale."The other authors on this study are Dáith? Stone, Michael Wehner, and Harinarayan Krishnan. All authors are scientists in Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division (CRD).Climate models work by simulating the exchange of air, water, and energy between the grid "boxes." In today's state-of-the-art climate models, these boxes are typically 100 to 200 kilometers wide. That level of detail is good enough to catch the formation and movement of midlatitude storms, the researchers said, because such systems tend to be quite large.In contrast, tropical cyclones tend to cover a smaller area. While the overall footprint of a hurricane can be broad, the eye of a hurricane can be very compact and well defined, the researchers noted."The problem with that 100-kilometer resolution is that it misses key details of the hurricanes and tropical cyclones, which are clearly relevant to the generation of extreme waves," said Stone. "But going to a 25-kilometer resolution data set is computationally challenging. It requires 64 times more computational resources than a 100-kilometer simulation."The study relied upon the data-crunching power of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a scientific computing user facility funded by the DOE Office of Science and based at Berkeley Lab.The researchers ran the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 (CAM5) climate model with data collected in three-hour increments at a low resolution of 100 kilometers and at a high resolution of 25?kilometers. They found that the high-resolution simulations included tropical cyclones where the low-resolution ones did not.To see if the cyclones had an effect on waves, they then ran global wave models at both resolutions. They saw extreme waves in the high-resolution model that did not appear in the low-resolution ones."Hurricanes are tricky things to model," said Stone. "We've shown the importance of using a high-resolution data set for producing hurricanes. But the characteristics of hurricanes could change with the climate. People are making projections of changes in ocean waves in a future, warmer world. It's not clear if the 25-kilometer resolution is sufficient for capturing all of the processes involved in the development of a hurricane. But we do know that it's better than 100 kilometers."While additional high-resolution simulations of the future are on the way, the researchers were able to take a first look at possible conditions at the end of the 21st century. Wehner noted that the biggest waves in Hawaii are projected to be substantially larger in a much warmer future world.The researchers added that this study only looked at averages of wind-generated waves. One-off "rogue" or "freak" waves cannot be reproduced in these kinds of models, and large waves such as tsunamis are very different since they are caused by seismological activity, not the wind.The data from this study will be made freely available for use by the wider scientific community."In the same way that weather patterns are part of the climate, ocean wave patterns are also part of the 'wave' climate," said Timmermans. "Ocean waves are relevant to the interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere, which affects the planet's climate as a whole." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
January 4, 2017 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170104133605.htm | More frequent hurricanes not necessarily stronger on Atlantic U.S. coast | Active Atlantic hurricane periods, like the one we are in now, are not necessarily a harbinger of more, rapidly intensifying hurricanes along the U.S. coast, according to new research performed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. | In fact, the research -- published Wednesday [Jan. 4, 2017] in the journal The relationship between the number of hurricanes that develop in the Atlantic basin and the number of major hurricanes that make landfall is a weak one, says Kossin, and one that has not yet been well explained. The new study accounts for at least part of that relationship.Historically, notes Kossin, researchers (including himself) have focused primarily on the tropical Atlantic -- the main hurricane development region -- without distinguishing how hurricane-producing conditions may vary outside of it.They knew a combination of warm ocean temperatures in the tropics and low vertical wind shear (changes in wind speed relative to altitude) results in favorable conditions for hurricane formation, while cooler than average sea surface temperatures work in tandem with higher than average wind shears to produce quieter hurricane seasons.Scientists also knew that environmental conditions, primarily ocean temperatures and wind shear, determine whether Atlantic hurricanes intensify or weaken as their natural track pushes them northwesterly toward the U.S. coast.But Kossin, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Centers for Environmental Information scientist working out of UW-Madison's NOAA Cooperative Institute, wondered "what other patterns there might be." His study took a step back and looked for related patterns over the entire basin.Kossin analyzed two datasets gathered over three 23-year periods from 1947 to 2015. The first dataset, from the historical record of hurricane observations maintained by the U.S. National Hurricane Center, supplied observations taken every six hours and included information on location, maximum winds and central pressure.The second, an environmental data set from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, provided a benchmark for sea surface temperatures and wind shear for the period of interest.Overall, when the tropics generate many hurricanes -- during periods of low wind shear and high ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic -- they also create a situation where those hurricanes lose energy if they approach the coast, as they encounter a harsh environment of higher wind shear and cooler ocean temperatures."They have to track through a gauntlet of high shear to reach the coast and many of them stop intensifying," Kossin says. "It is a natural mechanism for killing off hurricanes that threaten the U.S. coast."What are the implications for U.S. coastal regions? "It is good news," says Kossin. "Greater activity produces more threats, but at the same time, we increase our protective barrier. It's pretty amazing that it happens to work that way."The data suggest we may be moving into another quieter period in the basin, however, where less activity works hand in hand with lower wind shears along the coast, eradicating the protective barrier. As a result, says Kossin, while there may be fewer hurricanes approaching the coast, those that do may be much stronger, in the range of Category 3 to Category 5.The threat of rapid strengthening is highly relevant to society, in particular to those who live along densely populated coastlines where the warning times for evacuation may already be short."Knowing the relationship between tropical activity and coastal conditions that either protect the coast or make it more vulnerable may help us better prepare for future landfalls," Kossin says.Like any research study, the results raise more questions. For instance, how might climate change affect this relationship? Other studies, says Kossin, have documented a rise in sea surface temperatures -- a shift attributed to anthropogenic climate change. But the sea surface trend does not seem to be having a large effect on hurricane activity in the coastal region, at least over the past 70 years or so.Kossin says this could fall under the heading of a "climate surprise" if the environmental conditions responsible for the protective barrier during active periods are compromised by climate change."There is no reason to think that this is a stationary mechanism," says Kossin. "It's entirely possible that changes in climate could affect the natural barrier and thus significantly increase coastal hazard and risk." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,017 |
December 27, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161227110242.htm | Control algorithms could keep sensor-laden balloons afloat in hurricanes for a week | Controls engineers at UC San Diego have developed practical strategies for building and coordinating scores of sensor-laden balloons within hurricanes. | Using onboard GPS and cellphone-grade sensors, each drifting balloon becomes part of a ``swarm'' of robotic vehicles, which can periodically report, via satellite uplink, their position, the local temperature, pressure, humidity and wind velocity.This new, comparatively low-cost sensing strategy promises to provide much-needed in situ sampling of environmental conditions for a longer range of time and from many vantage points within developing hurricanes. This has the potential to greatly improve efforts to estimate and forecast the intensity and track of future hurricanes in real time.Current two to five day forecasts of many hurricanes deviate significantly from each other, and from the truth. For example, as Hurricane Matthew churned toward the eastern seaboard in early October of 2016, various news outlets reported "forecasts" like "Hurricane Matthew will probably make landfall somewhere between Charleston and Boston, so everyone brace yourselves.""Guidance like this is entirely inadequate for evacuation and emergence response preparations," said Thomas Bewley, a professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and the paper's senior author.Improved forecasts, to be greatly facilitated by improved in situ environmental sampling, are essential to protect property and save lives from such extreme environmental threats, he added.Key challenges in this effort include the design of small, robust, buoyancy-controlled balloons that won't accumulate ice; the efficient coordination of the motion of these balloons to keep them moving within the hurricane, between an altitude of 0 and 8 kilometers (about 5 miles); and to keep them well distributed over the dynamically significant regions within the hurricane, for up to a week at a time.Bewley and UC San Diego post-doctoral researcher Gianluca Meneghello detail various aspects of their work on this problem in the October 2016 issue of the The model for large-scale coordination of balloon swarms within hurricanes, as discussed in the Physical Review Fluids article, uses a clever strategy to model predictive control by leveraging the cutting-edge Weather Research and Forecasting code developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA).`The key idea of our large-scale balloon coordination strategy,'' said Bewley, "is to `go with the flow,' commanding small vertical movements of the balloons and leveraging the strong vertical stratification of the horizontal winds within the hurricane to distribute the balloons in the desired fashion horizontally."Intermediate-scale and small-scale fluctuations in the violent turbulent flow of a hurricane, which are unresolved by forecasting codes like WRF, are quite substantial. The researchers' strategy? "We simply ride out the smaller-scale fluctuations of the flow," said Meneghello. "The smaller-scale flowfield fluctuations induce something of a random walk in the balloon motion. We model these fluctuations statistically, and respond with corrections only if a balloon deviates too far from its desired location in the formation."As summarized in their ISSF paper, the researchers' strategy for applying such corrections, dubbed Three Level Control (and endearingly abbreviated TLC), applies a finite shift to the vertical location of the displaced balloon for a short period of time, again leveraging the strong vertical stratification of the horizontal winds to return the balloon to its nominal desired location.A third essential ingredient of the project, summarized in the researchers' IEEE paper, is the design of small (about 3 kg or 6.5 lbs.), robust, energetically-efficient, buoyancy-controlled balloons that can survive, without significant accumulation of ice, in the cold, wet, turbulent, electrically active environment of a hurricane. The balloons can operate effectively for up to a week at a time on a battery charge not much larger than that of a handful of iPhones. "Cellphone-grade technologies, for both environmental sensors as well as low-energy radios and microprocessors, coupled with new space-grade balloon technology developed by Thin Red Line Aerospace, are on the cusp of making this ambitious robotic sensing mission feasible," said Bewley.In addition to robotics, Bewley's team specializes in the field of control theory, which is the essential "hidden technology" in many engineering applications, such as cruise control and adaptive suspension systems in cars, stability augmentation systems in high-performance aircraft and adaptive noise cancellation in telecommunication. Control theory made it possible for SpaceX rockets to land on barges at sea. Though the math and numerical methods involved are sophisticated, the fundamental principle is straightforward: sensors take measurements of the physical environment, then a computer uses these measurements in real time to coordinate appropriate responses by the system (in this case, the buoyancy of the balloons) to achieve the desired effect.Bewley, Meneghello and colleagues are now working towards testing the balloons and algorithms designed in this study in the real world. With sensor balloon swarms and the special TLC coming out of their lab, fire and safety officials may soon have a crucial extra couple of days to move people out of harm's way, and to prepare emergency responses, when the next Katrina or Sandy threatens. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
December 14, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161214151624.htm | How soil moisture can help predict power outages caused by hurricanes | In the days before Hurricane Matthew, researchers used satellite maps of soil moisture to help forecast where the power would go out along the East Coast. | At the American Geophysical Union meeting this week, they report that their method worked with 91 percent accuracy.The project aims to curtail outages by helping power companies allocate equipment and crews in advance of storms, said Steven Quiring, professor of atmospheric sciences at The Ohio State University.Healthy trees that receive just the right amount of moisture are less prone to storm damage, he explained, so soil moisture is a good indicator of where outage crews will be needed."We see increased numbers of outages at both ends of the spectrum -- wherever soils are too wet or too dry," Quiring said. "Drought makes tree branches more likely to snap off, and over-saturation makes trees more likely to be uprooted."He cited a 2012 report from the Congressional Research Service that named severe weather as the single biggest cause of outages in the United States. More specifically, severe weather damage to vegetation is the biggest cause. Around 62 percent of the time, the report concluded, the power goes out because broken tree branches or falling trunks contact power lines.For Hurricane Matthew, the researchers were able to forecast five days ahead of time that 4.5 million people would be without power in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. The actual number worked out to be around 4.1 million, so the researchers overestimated the extent of outages by around 9 percent.NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite mission provided the data, which the researchers cross-referenced with population density, land use, average wind speed and the duration and intensity of storms to make their forecast model.The team, which includes Seth Guikema at the University of Michigan and Brent McRoberts at Texas A&M, has been using a similar computer model -- minus the NASA SMAP soil moisture measurements -- to predict hurricane-caused power outages for about a decade. For instance, they correctly estimated that superstorm Sandy would knock out power for about 10 million people in 2012.Quiring said the researchers are expanding the project to include outages caused by thunderstorms, winter storms and wind storms, which impact a much larger portion of the United States than hurricanes. They are already working with several power companies along the East Coast, and hope to form partnerships with companies in the Midwest and South next.Outages cost the American economy as much as $33 billion annually, according to the President's Council of Economic Advisers and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
December 6, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161206111417.htm | Sea spray studied to improve hurricane intensity forecasting | A University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science research team is studying sea spray to help improve forecasting of hurricanes and tropical cyclones. | In a recent study, the scientists found that in high winds conditions the amount of large sea spray droplets (over 0.5 milimeters in diameter) generated is as much as 1000 times more than previously thought.Sea spray droplets are aerosol water particles that are ejected into the atmosphere as waves break at the ocean surface. The evaporation of sea spray is thought to contribute to the transfer of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere, which accelerate winds in a storm, potentially impacting its intensity.To characterize the role these large droplets play at the air-sea surface, the researchers placed a high-resolution camera system outside of the Air-Sea Interaction Saltwater Tank (ASIST), one of the wind-wave basins in the UM SUSTAIN laboratory, to capture the silhouettes of water droplets flying through the air. For each image, an automatic identification algorithm was used to identify an individual droplet's location in space and their two-dimensional surface area. More than 35,000 individual images were acquired and processed for this study as part of the experimental trials. The wind speeds in the laboratory ranged from 80 to 120 miles per hour.In an analysis of how the droplet concentration changed with height above the ocean surface, they found that the vertical distribution of sea spray diverged from the existing theoretical distribution, which means the number of water droplets for a given air volume at a specific height above the ocean surface was significantly different than the predicted concentration. This information is critical to understanding the depth of the spray layer above the ocean surface and the overall impact of spray on storm intensity."Our work can be directly applied to a hurricane model to help improve hurricane intensity predictions, which will help people make more informed decisions with regard to their safety," said David Ortiz-Suslow, a Ph.D. candidate at the UM Rosenstiel School and lead author of the study.Over the last 10 years, scientists have made significant progress in predicting the track of tropical cyclones up to 72 hours. Three days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, the National Weather Service predicted the hurricane would hit the Florida Panhandle, approximately 250 miles away. This year, Hurricane Matthew's actual verses predicted paths were less than 50 miles apart in the 72-hour window. Intensity forecasting has not improved as sufficiently over the last 10 years. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
November 29, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161129114430.htm | Study offers coastal communities better way to prepare for devastating storms | Coastal storms can cause surges, sea-level rise, and cyclone winds that devastate communities. But emergency management experts in a new study detail a method for involving local stakeholders in planning for such extreme events and thereby helping such vulnerable areas in becoming more resilient | Coastal communities' ability to plan for, absorb, recover and adapt from destructive hurricanes is becoming more urgent. As of 2010, approximately 52 percent of the United States' population lived in vulnerable coastal watershed counties, and that number is expected to grow. Globally, almost half of the world's population lives along or near coastal areas."In general, risk management has not been sufficiently focused on coastal resilience, with community stakeholders involved in the process of making their coastline, as a system, more resilient to coastal storms," according to the study, "Enabling Stakeholder Involvement in Coastal Disaster Resilience Planning," by George Washington University researchers Thomas Bostick, Thomas Holzer, and Shahryar Sarkani. Their study was published in the online version of Risk Analysis, a publication of the Society for Risk Analysis."This research demonstrates a methodology for involving stakeholders in discussions that make their coastlines more resilient," says Bostick. After disasters strike, local stakeholders are often surprised and frustrated with the damages inflicted on their communities and seek greater involvement in reducing risk. That frustration can be addressed by investing more in physical infrastructures to protect against flooding. But the needed infrastructure can be expensive, such as the $14.5 billion the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was given to reinforce New Orleans after the 2005 destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, an amount of federal support that most high risk areas are unlikely to receive.Recognizing that a methodology was missing for integrating coastal stakeholders into the process of identifying and selecting of resilience-enhancing projects, the authors conducted a case study with data from a stakeholder meeting in Mobile Bay, Alabama, to demonstrate a method for engaging stakeholders over a longer period to identify what the group considered the community's most significant critical functions and project initiatives to preserve those functions under different scenarios. Mobile Bay, Alabama's only port for ocean-going ships and an entry point for smaller recreational and commercial vessels, has seen population growth and accompanying demand for housing, infrastructure development, and other changes that have impacted natural ecological systems. During tropical storms and hurricane events, Mobile Bay's Eastern Shore is vulnerable to coastal erosion and sediment transfer into the bay.A workshop involving approximately 30 participants was held in 2015 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Disaster Response Center in Mobile, Alabama, to test methods to calculate resilience for the Mobile Bay region. Participating stakeholders worked with subject matter experts in systems engineering, coastal engineering, risk and decision analysis, and other fields to develop a set of proposed projects to address key resilience stages and domains.Resilience domains include the physical (built infrastructure as well as wetlands, dunes, and other natural features), information (policies, building codes, evacuation routes, and other materials), cognitive (human processes for sharing and acting upon knowledge to make, communicate, and implement decisions), and social ("interactions, organizations, people, and policies that influence how decisions are made," such as government flood insurance, religions, cultures, and languages). "Coastal communities can improve resilience not only in the physical domain, but also in the information, cognitive and social domains," says Bostick. The methodology described in the study is intended to support such improvements.Through the workshop, stakeholders generated 11 project initiatives, including, for example, reducing saltwater intrusion, environmental and coastal storm education, utility pole replacement, removing scrap metal, and reducing impervious surfaces. The subject matter experts aligned the initiatives with the four critical stages associated with resilience: preparing, absorbing, recovering, and adapting. Participants also identified a set of critical functions, such as telecommunication, electricity, housing, clean water, the tourism industry, and others.In reviewing the workshop results, the authors note that their study does not seek to measure whether a community or a coastline is resilient or not because there "is clearly no agreement on how this would be accomplished." However, the methodology offers stakeholders an opportunity to understand the concept of resilience and scenarios and, based on this understanding, to make informed choices on how to improve the coastal resilience in their community. "This is a capability that does not currently exist," the authors write. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
November 23, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161123124441.htm | Hurricane risk to Northeast USA coast increasing, research warns | The Northeastern coast of the USA could be struck by more frequent and more powerful hurricanes in the future due to shifting weather patterns, according to new research. | Hurricanes have gradually moved northwards from the western Caribbean towards northern North America over the past few hundred years, the study led by Durham University, UK, found.The researchers suggest that this change in hurricane track was caused by the expansion of atmospheric circulation belts driven by increasing carbon dioxide emissions.New York and other major cities along the Northeast coast of the USA could come under increased threat from these severe storms and need to be better prepared for their potential impact, the researchers said.The findings are published in the journal They found that the average number of hurricanes at the Belize site decreased over time. When the hurricane history of Belize was compared with documentary hurricane records from places such as Bermuda and Florida, this information showed that Atlantic (Cape Verde) hurricanes were moving to the north rather than decreasing in total numbers.Although natural warming over the centuries has had some impact on shifting hurricane tracks, the researchers found a marked decrease in hurricane activity in the western Caribbean coinciding with the late 19th Century industrial boom associated with increasing carbon dioxide and sulphate aerosol emissions to the atmosphere.The researchers said that initial regional cooling of the Northern Hemisphere due to increased industrial aerosol emissions should have pushed the hurricane tracks southward since Industrialization.But they added that rising amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide had overridden this effect by expanding the Hadley cell -- a pattern of circulating air in Earth's tropical belt -- pushing hurricane tracks further north, away from the western Caribbean towards the Northeastern USA.This suggests that from the late 19th Century, humanmade emissions have become the main driver behind shifting hurricane tracks by altering the position of global weather systems, the researchers said.If future trends in carbon dioxide and industrial aerosol emissions continue as expected, hurricanes could shift even further northward, exacerbating the risk to the Northeast coast of the USA, they added.In 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the Caribbean and much of the eastern seaboard of the United States, stretching as far north as Canada. At least 233 people died as a result of the storm.A large number of US states were affected by Hurricane Sandy with New York and New Jersey suffering the greatest impacts. The estimated cost of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in the USA is said to have run into tens of billions of dollars.The study's lead author, Dr Lisa Baldini, in the Department of Geography, Durham University, said: "Our research shows that the hurricane risk to the Northeastern coast of the United States is increasing as hurricanes track further north."Since the 19th Century this shift was largely driven by humanmade emissions and if these emissions continue as expected this will result in more frequent and powerful storms affecting the financial and population centres of the Northeastern United States."Given the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy it is important that plans are put in place to protect against the effects of similarly destructive storms which could potentially occur more often in the future."Co-author Dr Amy Frappier, of the Geosciences Department, Skidmore College, USA, said the research showed Atlantic hurricanes were responding to warming. Dr Frappier said: "Aerosols from volcanoes and industrialisation in the Northern Hemisphere have a cooling effect, which tend to shift moisture belts and hurricane tracks southward, closer to the equator."On the other hand, warming from more carbon dioxide in the air tends to expand Earth's tropical belt, pushing hurricane tracks further north away from the western Caribbean and towards the Northeastern US."This suggests that the tracks of Atlantic hurricanes have responded more to warming than to regional cooling." The researchers added that the northward shift in hurricane tracks may not reduce the risk of tropical cyclones in the Caribbean.Co-author Dr James Baldini, in Durham University's Department of Earth Sciences, said: "Although hurricane tracks have gradually moved northwards away from the western Caribbean, rising sea surface temperatures could promote the development of cyclonic storms within the western Caribbean."Consequently tropical cyclone activity across the western Caribbean may remain essentially stable over the current century, which has important implications for water availability in this region."However, increased sea surface temperatures also provide extra energy, potentially fueling larger storms. We therefore need to prepare for the effects of more frequent landfalls of larger storms along the Northeast coast of the United States and stronger storms impacting the Caribbean." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
November 22, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161122130040.htm | Widespread land losses from 2010 Gulf oil spill, study finds | Dramatic, widespread shoreline loss is revealed in new NASA/U.S. Geological Survey annual maps of the Louisiana marshlands where the coastline was most heavily coated with oil during the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. | Following the spill, the length of shoreline that receded more than 13 feet (4 meters) a year quadrupled compared to the year before the spill. The land losses occurred mainly in areas where oil had washed ashore during the spill.A research team led by Amina Rangoonwala of USGS used airborne remote sensing imagery to analyze shoreline loss across nearly the entire upper Barataria Bay, located on the western side of the Mississippi River Delta, beginning a year before the spill and extending for 2.5 years after it. To determine whether the erosion was likely to be caused by the oil, they also compared shoreline loss linked to the deposited oil with shoreline erosion caused by high waves from Hurricane Isaac in 2012.The team found that although erosion occurred at isolated sections of the shoreline before the spill, the pre-spill shoreline (as analyzed from 2009 to 2010) was largely stable. In the first year after the spill (2010 to 2011), the erosion pattern changed dramatically from isolated to widespread. Erosion occurred mainly along shorelines with documented heavy to moderate oil coating. In the second year after the spill (2011 to 2012), the higher loss rates extended to areas that had less oil coating. Oil is known to weaken or kill vegetation, leading to loss of the roots that help hold soil together.In August 2012, two months after the two-year post-spill period, Hurricane Isaac made a direct hit on Barataria Bay. Erosion rates measured in the four months after the hurricane were higher than those measured after the spill. But this erosion occurred primarily on just a few shorelines that before the spill showed evidence of heightened susceptibility to wave-generated erosion."Our study uniquely shows that the patterns of shoreline recession seen in this region can be directly related to distinctly different causes: broadly dispersed erosion due to oiling from the Deepwater Horizon spill, and enhanced, but spatially limited, erosion due to intense storm impacts," said Rangoonwala.The wetland impacts of the spill documented by the team included both the loss of wetlands due to shoreline erosion, and island fragmentation, where small islands are broken into even smaller islands, creating more shoreline. Land lost from fragmentation is unlikely to be reestablished, particularly in this part of the Mississippi River delta where levees prevent an influx of new sediments from the river. This will alter natural coastal defenses against flooding.The images collected in the annual surveys and following Hurricane Isaac were obtained from NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), developed and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. UAVSAR flies on a C-20A research aircraft based at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center facility in Palmdale, California. UAVSAR's polarized radar produced detailed representations of the marsh, which USGS scientists then used to develop a process to analyze the shoreline recession by mapping the change in shore location."Through this process, USGS and NASA scientists developed a repeatable, quantitative mapping method that will allow us to monitor shoreline erosion after oil spills in the future," said study co-author Cathleen Jones of JPL. "Being able to compare shoreline losses in a year without any major storm to losses both after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and after the hurricane was essential to correlating the erosion of the marsh to its underlying causes."The study, "Wetland shoreline recession in the Mississippi River Delta from petroleum oiling and cyclonic storms," is published in the journal NASA collects data from space, air, land and sea to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records. The agency freely shares this unique knowledge and works with institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is changing.Developed to test new technologies and study Earth surface dynamics, UAVSAR is informing the design and planning for a future spaceborne radar mission, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), which is planned to image almost the entire Earth's surface at least once every 12 days.For more information on UAVSAR, visit: For more information on NISAR, visit: For more information about NASA's Earth science activities, visit: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
November 15, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161115150911.htm | A rising tide of heart attacks followed Hurricane Katrina | Ten years after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, hospital admissions for heart attacks in the city were three times higher than they were before the storm, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2016. | "After Hurricane Katrina devastated our city, the cardiology department found that we had very busy on-call nights," said Anand Irimpen, M.D., study lead author and professor of medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine and chief of cardiology at Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System in New Orleans, Louisiana. "We were being called into the hospital for heart attacks much more often than during pre-Katrina days. So, I suggested to our cardiology fellows that we study the data to look at this phenomenon objectively to determine whether this was a real increase or only a perception."Investigators found that hospital admissions to Tulane Medical Center for heart attacks increased three-folds in the 10 years after Katrina (post-Katrina), compared to the two years before the storm in August 2005 (pre-Katrina).In addition, post-Katrina patients were significantly more likely to have other risk factors for heart attack, including:"Although the general emphasis after an event such as Katrina is on rebuilding, we should not neglect the health of those affected by a disaster," Irimpen said. "This massive natural disaster may have had a greater impact on the development of chronic medical diseases than originally realized."In other findings, the study identified additional potential health problems among the post-storm group. For example, these patients were more than twice as likely to abuse drugs and/or to have a psychiatric disease as their pre-Katrina counterparts. In addition, unemployment and a lack of health insurance were significantly more frequent among the post-Katrina group of patients. Post-Katrina patients were also more likely to receive prescriptions for heart-disease medications and drugs to lower cholesterol and high blood pressure, although they were only half as likely to take their medication, compared to the pre-Katrina group.For this single-center study, investigators examined 150 records for heart attack patients admitted to Tulane Medical Center in the two years before Katrina, and 2,341 records in the 10 years afterwards.Since the study was observational, it only found an association between Katrina and an increase in heart attacks, not a cause of the increase. In addition to this limitation, the study involved patients at a single hospital and could not control for all possible influences on heart attack risk since data relied on medical records of past heart attacks.According to the American Heart Association, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Each year, more than half a million people have a first heart attack, and about 200,000 have a recurrent one.The good news is that risk for heart attack can be lowered with lifestyle changes such as avoiding smoking, eating a healthy diet, controlling high blood cholesterol and blood pressure, being physically active, controlling our weight, managing diabetes, reducing stress, and limiting alcohol, according to the American Heart Association. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
November 14, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161114113539.htm | 2016 is set to break even the temperature records of 2015 | It is very likely that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, with global temperatures even higher than the record-breaking temperatures in 2015. Preliminary data shows that 2016's global temperatures are approximately 1.2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to an assessment by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). | Global temperatures for January to September 2016 have been about 0.88° Celsius (1.58°F) above the average (14°C) for the 1961-1990 reference period, which is used by WMO as a baseline. Temperatures spiked in the early months of the year because of the powerful El Niño event of 2015-16. Preliminary data for October indicate that they are at a sufficiently high level for 2016 to remain on track for the title of hottest year on record. This would mean that 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have been this century (1998 was the other one).Long-term climate change indicators are also record breaking. Concentrations of major greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to increase to new records. Arctic sea ice remained at very low levels, especially during early 2016 and the October re-freezing period, and there was significant and very early melting of the Greenland ice sheet.Ocean heat was boosted by the El Niño event, contributing to coral reef bleaching, and above-average sea-level rise.The deadliest event so far in 2016 has been Hurricane Matthew, which was Haiti's worst humanitarian emergency since the 2010 earthquake. Throughout the year, extreme weather led to considerable socio-economic losses in all regions of the world."Another year. Another record. The high temperatures we saw in 2015 are set to be beaten in 2016," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. The extra heat from the powerful El Niño event has disappeared. The heat from global warming will continue," he said."In parts of Arctic Russia, temperatures were 6°C to 7°C above the long-term average. Many other Arctic and sub-Arctic regions in Russia, Alaska and northwest Canada were at least 3°C above average. We are used to measuring temperature records in fractions of a degree, and so this is different," said Mr Taalas."Because of climate change, the occurrence and impact of extreme events has risen. 'Once in a generation' heatwaves and flooding are becoming more regular. Sea level rise has increased exposure to storm surges associated with tropical cyclones," he said."The Paris Agreement came into force in record time and with record global commitment. The World Meteorological Organization will support the translation of the Paris Agreement into action," he said."WMO is working to improve monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions to help countries reduce them. Better climate predictions over timescales of weeks to decades will help key sectors like agriculture, water management, health and energy plan for and adapt to the future. More impact-based weather forecasts and early warning systems will save lives both now and in the years ahead. There is a great need to strengthen the disaster early warning and climate service capabilities of especially developing countries. This is a powerful way to adapt to climate change," said Mr Taalas.WMO published the provisional statement for 2016 to inform the United Nations Climate Change conference taking place in Marrakech, Morocco (COP22). The final statement will be released in early 2017. For the first time, the assessment includes input from UN partners on the humanitarian impact.It complements a report on the 2011-2015 global climate, which was also submitted to COP22 to give a longer-term picture of the climate and to address multi-year events like droughts. That report showed that, of 79 studies published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society between 2011 and 2014, more than half found that human-induced climate change contributed to the extreme event in question. Some studies found that the probability of extreme heat increased by 10 times or more.Global temperatures for January to September 2016 were approximately 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels and 0.88°C (1.58°F) above the average for the 1961-1990 reference period. They were especially warm in the early months of the year, with record monthly anomalies of +1.12°C (+2.02°F) in February and +1.09°C (+1.96°F) in March. Operational October data from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting ERA-40 reanalysis indicate that October temperature anomalies were similar to May to September ones.Temperatures were above the 1961-90 average over the vast majority of land areas. In parts of Arctic Russia around the Ob River estuary and Novaya Zemlya, they were 6°C to 7°C above average. Many other Arctic and sub-Arctic regions in Russia, Alaska and northwest Canada were at least 3°C above average. More than 90% of Northern Hemisphere land areas outside the tropics were at least 1°C above average. Temperatures were less extreme in the Southern Hemisphere, but many areas were still 1°C or more above average, including northern South America, northern and eastern Australia, and much of southern Africa.The only large land area with below-average temperatures was part of subtropical South America (northern and central Argentina, parts of Paraguay and lowland Bolivia).Temperatures were above normal over most ocean areas. This contributed to significant coral bleaching and disruption of marine ecosystems in some tropical waters, including the Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia, and Pacific island countries such as Fiji and Kiribati. Coral mortality of up to 50% was reported in parts of the Great Barrier Reef.The most prominent area of below-normal sea surface temperatures was the Southern Ocean south of 45° South (especially around the Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica, where temperatures were more than 1°C below normal in places).Global sea levels rose about 15 millimetres between November 2014 and February 2016 as a result of El Niño, well above the post-1993 trend of 3 to 3.5 mm per year, with the early 2016 values reaching new record highs. Since February, sea levels have remained fairly stable.Annual average global carbon dioxide concentrations in 2015 reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time. Initial observations indicate new records in 2016. At Cape Grim (Australia), COArctic sea ice extent was well below normal throughout the year. The seasonal minimum in September was 4.14 million square kilometres, the equal-second (with 2007) lowest extent on record after 2012. The winter maximum in March was the lowest on record. The autumn freeze-up has also been much slower than normal; the sea ice extent as of the end of October is the lowest on record for the time of year.After several years of well-above-normal values, Antarctic sea ice extent fell to near normal by the start of 2016. It reached a seasonal maximum nearly a month earlier than usual. It was still well below normal as of the end of October.Summer melting on the Greenland ice sheet was substantially above the 1990-2013 average, with especially strong melting in July, but was less than in the record melting year of 2012.Numerous weather events had major impacts in 2016. The most significant, in terms of casualties, was Hurricane Matthew in October. According to Haitian government figures at the start of November, there were 546 confirmed deaths and 438 injured as a result of the hurricane. After crossing Haiti, Matthew tracked north and went on to cause damage in Cuba and the Bahamas, before tracking along the east coast of the United States and making landfall in South Carolina, causing major flooding.The Yangtze basin in China had its most significant summer floods since 1999, killing 310 people and causing an estimated US$14 billion in damage. Flooding and landslides in Sri Lanka in mid-May left more than 200 people dead or missing, and displaced several hundred thousand. Above-normal seasonal rainfall in the Sahel led to significant flooding in the Niger River basin, with the river reaching its highest levels in about 50 years in Mali.There were a number of major heatwaves during 2016. The year started with an extreme heatwave in southern Africa, exacerbated by the ongoing drought. Many stations set all-time records, including 42.7°C at Pretoria and 38.9°C at Johannesburg on 7 January. Thailand saw a national record of 44.6°C on 28 April. Phalodi saw a new record for India of 51.0°C on 19 May. Record or near-record temperatures occurred in parts of the Middle East and north Africa on a number of occasions in summer. Mitribah (Kuwait) recorded 54.0°C on July 21 which, subject to ratification through standard WMO procedures, will be the highest temperature on record for Asia. The following day, 53.9°C was recorded at Basra (Iraq) and 53.0°C at Delhoran (Iran).The most damaging wildfire in Canadian history occurred in May in the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta. The fire ultimately burned an area of about 590,000 hectares and was Canada's most costly natural disaster. It led to the total evacuation of the city and ultimately destroyed 2,400 buildings, causing 4 billion Canadian dollars (US$3 billion) in insured losses and several billion more in other losses.Major droughts affected several parts of the world, most of them associated with the El Niño event, which had a big influence on precipitation. Southern Africa experienced a second consecutive bad rainy season in 2015-16. Most of the region normally receives little rain between May and October, and the World Food Programme estimates that 17 million people will require assistance during the "lean season" ahead of the next harvest in early 2017.Annual and long-term changes in the climate system can aggravate social, humanitarian and environmental pressure. According to International Organisation for Migration, population migration is expected to increase as a result of more frequent and potentially more intense weather-related disasters, competition and conflict over shrinking resources, and rising sea levels rendering coastal and low lying zones uninhabitable.According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), in 2015 there were 19.2 million new displacements associated with weather, water, climate and geophysical hazards in 113 countries, more than twice as many as for conflict and violence. Of these, weather-related hazards triggered 14.7 million displacements. South and East Asia dominated in terms of the highest absolute figures, but no region of the world was unaffected. Equivalent data for 2016 are not yet available.Extreme weather and climate related events influenced by the strong El-Niño in 2015/2016 had significant negative impacts on agriculture and food security. More than 60 million people around the world were affected by these events, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
November 1, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161101093850.htm | Hurricanes from three million years ago give us clues about present storms | Studying hurricane and tropical storm development from three million years ago might give today's forecasters a good blueprint for 21st century storms, says a team of international researchers that includes a Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor. | Robert Korty, associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M, along with colleagues from China, Norway, and the University of Wisconsin, have had their work published in the current issue of PNAS The team studied storm development from the Pliocene era, roughly three million years ago, and chose that time period because it was the last time Earth had as much carbon dioxide as it does now, and the changes in climate from it can play a major role in storm formation and intensity.Using computer models and simulations, the team found an increase in the average intensity during the period and the storms most often moved into higher latitudes -- to a more northward direction."There seems to be a limit on how strong these ancient storms might be, but the number getting close to the limit appears to be larger during warmer periods," Korty explains."They reached their peak intensity at higher latitudes, following an expansion of tropical conditions with warming. It is consistent with smaller changes in the same patterns that we have observed over recent decades and project to continue over the next 100 years. I think it gives us greater confidence in some trends we are witnessing about how storms may change in future years."Researchers today know that the oceans continued to be relatively warm during the Pliocene era, though there has been some uncertainty where waters were warmest. Their study found that the increase in average intensity and in the poleward expansion occurred regardless of where the greatest change in temperatures occurred in the Pliocene.Korty says the study adds more evidence "that future storms are likely to be stronger in their intensity and to remain strong even as they move out of the tropics." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
October 27, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161027094946.htm | Engineer developing tools, technologies to make a better, smarter power grid | In the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew earlier this month, NASA released satellite images showing long, dark swaths along the Atlantic coasts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. | Some 2 million homes and businesses lost power in the storm. A low-tech and decades-old power grid never had a chance."It's really a 'dumb' system," said Zhaoyu Wang, an Iowa State University assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.Wang and other engineers are working to change that. They're looking for ways to modernize the distribution system that brings power to our homes and offices. They're out to make a more reliable power grid for all of us. They want to build a smart grid."The main purpose of grid modernization is to build an efficient and resilient power grid for the future development of our economy," Wang said.Wang is now working on four projects that could help build a better grid:1. 2. 3. 4. Wang said the projects are also supported by cost-share funding from Iowa State, the College of Engineering, the department of electrical and computer engineering and the Iowa Energy Center.Wang credited several colleagues for their support and collaboration on the projects -- James McCalley, an Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering and Jack London Chair in Power Systems Engineering; Anne Kimber, executive director of Iowa State's Electric Power Research Center; Ian Dobson, the Arend J. and Verna V. Sandbulte Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Venkataramana Ajjarapu, the David C. Nicholas Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.The four grid projects will support the work of eight doctoral students and one postdoctoral researcher. Wang said all the research has a common goal that can be appreciated by anybody riding out a storm:"We're always trying our best to do one thing -- enhance the power grid. We want to make it more secure, reliable and resilient. We're trying to build a power grid that is modern, flexible and highly efficient." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
October 17, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161017140626.htm | Evaluating forecasting models for predicting rainfall from tropical cyclones | Many people know that tropical cyclones and hurricanes cause high winds and storm surges. But two of their other effects, heavy rainfall and inland flooding, can be just as dangerous and impact larger areas. | Most recently, inland rainfall produced by Hurricane Matthew has caused record flooding in North Carolina, with the levels of some already swollen rivers and streams continuing to rise.According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), more than 50 percent of the deaths associated with hurricanes from 1970 to 2004 were caused by fresh water flooding. And from 1981 to 2011, hurricane damage accounted for almost half -- $417.9 billion -- of the total monetary damage from all weather and climate disasters during that same time period (adjusted for inflation to 2011 dollars).With the goal of providing basic information to help improve preparedness and mitigation efforts, new University of Iowa-led research published online in September in the Journal of Hydrology examined how accurate current forecasting systems are in predicting rainfall from North Atlantic tropical cyclones that reach land in the United States.Comparing five state-of-the-art weather prediction models, researchers found current models can forecast both where and how much rainfall a tropical cyclone will produce up to two days in advance. However, the forecast's accuracy decreased significantly when the prediction window increased to five days. The researchers' findings were based on 15 North Atlantic hurricanes that came within at least 500 kilometers of the U.S. coastline from 2007 to 2012.Gabriele Villarini, UI associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and corresponding author on the paper, says researchers honed in on predicting the impacts of tropical cyclones because that information is generally more useful than typical forecasts that predict how many storms are expected in a season."The more specific the information we can provide is, the more useful it will be. This is why we have been moving toward predicting U.S. landfalling tropical cyclone activity and the associated rainfall," he says.Villarini, also an associate research engineer at the UI's Iowa Flood Center, says while a 48-hour lead time is a good starting point in terms of warning, he will continue to conduct more research to improve these predictions."By improving our understanding of the processes that drive tropical cyclones and hurricanes, we will be better positioned to improve our ability to forecast these events and their impacts with longer and longer lead times," he says.Gabriel Vecchi, head of the climate variations and predictability group at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab and another author on the paper, says decades of weather prediction data show that forecasts have improved -- and will improve -- as scientists learn more about hurricanes."We can't do anything about the past," he says. "The goal of this work is to provide better information in the future."Vecchi, who has collaborated with Villarini on several research projects, says he values the expertise in flooding and hydrology that Villarini and the Iowa Flood Center bring to their partnership."This is one of these examples of interdisciplinary work that has been incredibly fruitful," he says. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
October 6, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161006115959.htm | As the climate warms, we are 'primed' for worse storms than Sandy | With the climate warming and the sea level rising, conditions are ripe for storms deadlier and more devastating than Sandy that put more people at risk. | That's the outlook from David A. Robinson, a Rutgers geography professor who has served as the New Jersey state climatologist for 25 years.With the warming of New Jersey's climate expected to continue, the atmosphere will hold nearly 4 percent more moisture for every 1 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature, according to Robinson. The increased warmth and moisture will lead to a more energetic atmosphere, and warmer sea surface temperatures will add fuel to the fire. Meanwhile, rising development in coastal areas has put more people in harm's way."You still need a trigger but we're primed for more significant storms that will produce heavy rainfall and heavy snowfall," he said.That doesn't mean storm frequency will rise because it's unclear whether the conditions that trigger storms will increase or decrease. But storm precipitation and wind speeds should increase, along with freshwater and storm surge flooding and wind damage, according to Robinson. And more intense tropical storms may make it up to the Jersey coastline and beyond, fueled by warmer ocean waters, researchers say.Robinson and Steven G. Decker, an instructor in Rutgers' Meteorology Undergraduate Program, say Sandy was not the worst possible storm in the region and they warn that as the sea rises, much weaker storms than Sandy may pack big punches.Since the early 1800s, several storms have posed greater threats in the mid-Atlantic region than Sandy. They include the 1821 hurricane that made landfall in Cape May, with sustained winds that may have topped 100 mph; the deadly 1938 hurricane that slammed into Long Island and southeastern New England; and the 1944 hurricane that cruised just off the New Jersey coast but dumped heavy rain, brought strong winds and spawned a significant surge, according to Robinson and Decker.Sandy's extreme storm surge and strong winds caused most of its damage. But a slower storm could cause far more coastal and inland flooding damage than Sandy, and future storms could unleash stronger winds along the coast and inland, they say.Last month, Hurricane Hermine threatened to cause major coastal flooding in New Jersey and other states, but moved farther east than computer models initially predicted, sparing the region its full fury.Anthony J. Broccoli, a meteorologist and professor who chairs Rutgers' Department of Environmental Sciences, said the consensus, based on computer simulations, is that the strongest hurricanes in the North Atlantic basin will get stronger by the end of this century.But that conclusion is far from iron-clad and it's also unclear if the number of hurricanes will increase, decrease or remain the same, Broccoli said.A more subtle question is how the hurricane threat to New Jersey will change over time, he said."A warmer climate could make it easier for storms to maintain their intensity as they move out of the tropics," he said. "So even if there aren't more storms, there could be more storms that survive at a given intensity level and reach our latitude. Storm tracks also could change, and that could lessen or increase the threat to New Jersey."If damaging storms become more frequent, Robinson said, retreat from areas with mounting repetitive losses will become a topic of discussion."But we have such an investment along the Jersey coast that it's going to be one of the last places where people will back off," he said. "Economically, it's an enormous part of the state, so you're going to see battles to deal with Mother Nature well into the future." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
October 6, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161006094900.htm | Satellites see Hurricane Matthew heading for the Bahamas | Satellites from NASA and NOAA have been tracking and analyzing powerful Hurricane Matthew since its birth just east of the Leeward Islands on Sept. 28. | On October 4, 2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall on southwestern Haiti as a category-4 storm -- the strongest storm to hit the Caribbean nation in more than 50 years. Just hours after landfall, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite acquired a natural-color image that showed the western extent over the eastern tip of Cuba and the eastern-most extent over Puerto Rico.At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland the NASA/NOAA GOES Project combined infrared and visible imagery from NOAA's GOES-East satellite into an animation of Matthew. The animation of imagery from Oct. 3 to Oct. 5 shows Hurricane Matthew making landfall in Haiti and eastern Cuba then move toward the Bahamas.On Oct. 5, there were many warnings and watches in effect on Oct. 5 from Cuba to the Bahamas to Florida.A Hurricane Warning is in effect for the Cuban provinces of Guantanamo, Santiago de Cuba, Holguin, Granma and Las Tunas; the Southeastern Bahamas, including the Inaguas, Mayaguana, Acklins, Crooked Island, Long Cay, and Ragged Island; the Central Bahamas, including Long Island, Exuma, Rum Cay, San Salvador, and Cat Island; the Northwestern Bahamas, including the Abacos, Andros Island, Berry Islands, Bimini, Eleuthera, Grand Bahama Island, and New Providence. In Florida a Hurricane Warning is in effect from north of Golden Beach to the Flagler/Volusia county line and Lake Okeechobee.A Hurricane Watch is in effect for the Cuban province of Camaguey and north of the Flagler/Volusia county line to Fernandina Beach. A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for Haiti, Turks and Caicos Islands. In Florida a Hurricane Watch is in effect for Chokoloskee to Golden Beach, the Florida Keys from Seven Mile Bridge eastward, and Florida Bay.At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), the eye of Hurricane Matthew was located near 21.8 degrees north latitude and 75.2 degrees west longitude. That's about 55 miles (90 km) north-northwest of Cabo Lucrecia, Cuba and about 105 miles (165 km) south of Long Island, Bahamas.The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said "Matthew is moving toward the northwest near 12 mph (19 kph), and this motion is expected to continue during the next 24 to 48 hours. On this track, Matthew will be moving across the Bahamas through Thursday, and is expected to be very near the east coast of Florida by Thursday evening, Oct. 6.Maximum sustained winds are near 120 mph (195 kph) with higher gusts. Matthew is a category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Some strengthening is forecast during the next couple of days, and Matthew is expected to remain at category 3 or stronger while it moves through the Bahamas and approaches the east coast of Florida. Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 45 miles (75 km) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 175 miles (280 km)."The minimum central pressure reported by both Hurricane Hunter planes was 962 millibars.An unconfirmed wind gust of 155 mph (250 kph) was reported in Baracoa, Cuba, on the night of Oct. 4 as the eye of Matthew passed nearby.For storm specifics on rainfall, wind and storm surge, visit the NHC website: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
September 20, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160920152812.htm | Hurricanes, storm surges and icebergs: How warmer seas are changing our planet | Severe hurricanes, storm surges and an increase in the number of icebergs are just some of the changes planet Earth has experienced due to warming oceans over the last 20 years, according to a new report. | The report, Explaining ocean warming: causes, scales, effects and consequences, which was presented at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii recently (5 September 2016), has found the upper depths of the world's oceans have warmed significantly since 1995.A chapter of the study, led by Professor Grant Bigg and Professor Edward Hanna from the University of Sheffield's Department of Geography, has revealed how this increase in sea temperatures has changed global weather patterns.The Sheffield scientists have shown that the rise in ocean temperatures has caused an increase in the number of severe hurricanes and typhoons, such as Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, and Typhoon Haiyan, which caused massive destruction in the Philippines in 2013.Hurricanes have even been observed in the South Atlantic for the first time since satellite records began in the 1970s. The area was traditionally viewed as an unlikely region for hurricane formation because of its cooler sea surface temperatures, however in 2004 conditions were more favourable than normal due to warmer ocean temperatures, spawning Hurricane Catarina off the coast of Brazil.The report also shows that warmer seas have resulted in a significant loss of ice in the Arctic region. The atmosphere in the polar regions has warmed at about twice the average rate of global warming with Arctic coasts experiencing a rise in the occurrence of storm surges.This increase in storm surges can have a detrimental effect on fragile ecosystems in the area, such as low relief tundra, underlain by permafrost, according to the report.Warmer oceans have also caused a distinct change in El Niño events -- the warmer currents associated with the cycle have now been observed towards the central Pacific rather than the west, according to the Sheffield scientists.Professor Grant Bigg, from the University's Department of Geography, said: "Many people may associate warmer seas with the pleasant weather conditions they're used to experiencing while on holiday, but the fact of the matter is that an increase in sea temperatures is having a huge impact on the world's weather."Our study has shown that severe hurricanes, storm surges, melting ice in the Arctic region and changes to El Niño are all being caused by sea temperatures rising across the planet. These are all things that can have a devastating impact on the way we live our lives."We hope that this research, together with studies presented by our colleagues in Hawaii this week, will help to shape the response of conservation and sustainable development to ocean warming."The report also predicts what implications warming seas may have for our planet in the near future if current trends continue.The continued warming of tropical oceans is likely to cause stresses on ecosystems, such as coral bleaching, and stronger tropical cyclones. It may also cause changes to climate over land, which could reduce crop production as temperatures rise.This research is part of a report on ocean warming by some of the world's leading climate change scientists. The report was presented at the IUCN's World Conservation Congress in Hawaii on 5 September 2016. For more information on the IUCN's World Conservation Congress, please visit: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
September 15, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160915085559.htm | 'Funneling' behind severe flooding on the Clyde | A "funneling" effect has been a major factor in severe flooding on the River Clyde in recent years, according to a study by mathematicians at the University of Strathclyde. | The researchers produced a modelling programme to simulate surges in the river's waters which played a role in floods in recent years, including the hurricane which swept Scotland in December 2011.The results are the fullest analysis so far of surge waves in the Clyde and could be used to forecast future extreme weather.Professor Mike Heath, of Strathclyde's Department of Mathematics & Statistics, was a partner in the research. He said: "Storm surges are an abnormal increase of water levels in response to disruptive weather. They have the capacity to cause damaging flooding in coastal areas, especially when they coincide with high spring tides."The location and physical layout of the Firth of Clyde make it an area with high flooding risk. In this research, we used a three-dimensional hydrodynamic model to simulate surges in the Clyde during storms; our findings suggest that floods are caused not only by extreme surges but also by moderate surges coupled with high spring tides."The water level is also enhanced by a 'funneling' effect, which is linked to the depth of the river's floor and the complexity of the Clyde's sea coastline. Our findings suggested that the areas of the Clyde most exposed to severe surges were its firth and areas which resemble fjords."The storms with the highest water levels usually followed a particular pattern, with low pressure from the Atlantic moving to the north of mainland Scotland or further north. Regions such as the bay areas of the west coast in the US are usually protected from surges from outside but their basins are larger than that of the Clyde and their channels to the ocean are narrower."The study examined three storm surge incidents in December 2011 -- on the 13th and 28th of the month and a particularly severe storm on the 8th-9th of the month.The research was led by Dr Alessandro Sabatino, a Research Student in Strathclyde's Department of Mathematics & Statistics. It also involved researchers from Marine Scotland Science.The research has been published in the journal | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
August 25, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160825113319.htm | Hurricanes are worse, but experience, gender and politics determine if you believe it | Objective measurements of storm intensity show that North Atlantic hurricanes have grown more destructive in recent decades. But coastal residents' views on the matter depend less on scientific fact and more on their gender, belief in climate change and recent experience with hurricanes, according to a new study by researchers at Princeton University, Auburn University-Montgomery, the Louisiana State University and Texas A&M University. | The researchers plumbed data from a survey of Gulf Coast residents and found that the severity of the most recent storm a person weathered tended to play the largest role in determining whether they believed storms were getting worse over time, according to the study published in the Respondents' opinions also strongly differed depending on whether they were male or female, whether they believed in climate change and whether they were a Democrat or a Republican. For instance, people who believe in climate change were far more likely to perceive the increasing violence of storms than those who did not. The researchers noted that because climate change has become a politically polarizing issue, party affiliation also was an indicator of belief in strengthening storms."Understanding how people in coastal regions perceive the threat is important because it influences whether they will take the necessary actions to address that threat," said Ning Lin, the senior researcher on the study and a Princeton assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering."What you see is that there is often a gap between the reality of the storm trends and how people interpret those trends," said Siyuan Xian, a doctoral candidate in Lin's lab and co-lead author of the new paper.While scientists continue to debate the impact of climate change on the frequency and strength of hurricanes, numerous studies of objective measures -- such as wind speed, storm-surge height and economic damage -- show that hurricanes are stronger than they were even a few decades ago.For instance, eight of the 10 most economically damaging hurricanes since 1980 have occurred since 2004, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In constant dollars, Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Sandy caused nearly $154 billion and $68 billion in damage, respectively, according to NOAA.In comparison, the costliest storms of the 1990s, Hurricanes Andrew (1992) and Floyd (1999), caused $46 billion and $9 billion in damage (adjusted for inflation), respectively. Hurricane Patricia in 2015 was the strongest Western Hemisphere storm in recorded history with maximum sustained winds of 215 miles per hour.As the intensity of storms has increased, government agencies and coastal residents must grapple with preparing for the next landfall. Residents must decide, for example, whether to invest in storm shutters, roof and wall fortifications, flood-proof flooring and other structural buffers. On a larger scale, coastal planners need voter support to implement land-use policies that take the threat into account and to invest taxpayer dollars into protection measures such as seawalls or sand dunes.Understanding how people perceive the threat of hurricanes is crucial for predicting whether they will take them seriously, Xian said. Six hurricanes form each year in the North Atlantic on average, although as many as 15 have developed in a single hurricane season."If you perceive a higher risk, you will be more likely to support policies and take action to ameliorate the impacts," Xian said. "We wanted to know how people perceive the threat of hurricanes and what influences their perceptions. This information will help guide how agencies communicate the risk, and what policies and actions are proposed to make communities resilient to these storms."Lin and Xian worked with co-authors Wanyun Shao, assistant professor of geography at Auburn University-Montgomery; Barry Keim, professor of climatology at Louisiana State University; and Kirby Goidel, a Texas A&M professor of communication.To explore what influences perceptions of hurricane threat, the researchers analyzed data from the 2012 Gulf Coast Climate Change Survey to analyze Gulf Coast residents' beliefs about hurricane trends from 1992 to 2011. Louisiana State University and NOAA conducted the survey.The survey focused on residents of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, who lived in areas of the Gulf Coast that experienced at least one hurricane landfall over the 20-year period from 1992 to 2011.In addition to probing beliefs about hurricane trends, the survey gathered information on respondents' gender, political affiliations, opinions on climate change and other characteristics that might influence their perspective on hurricane trends.The researchers' results mirrored a trend seen in other studies of extreme climate events, Lin said."The increasing power of Atlantic hurricanes is often connected to climate change, but studies have shown that Republicans and males tend to be more skeptical of climate change," Lin said. "We found a strong link between disbelief in climate change and disbelief that storms are getting worse -- they tend to come as a package."The researchers were able to tease out what elements of the storms a respondent had experienced left the biggest impression on them. For instance, while storm surges tend to cause the most property damage, gale winds were more likely to convince people that hurricanes are getting stronger.Behavioral scientists have long hypothesized the most recent landfall of a storm has a stronger influence on people's perceptions of long-term climate trends, said Sander van der Linden, a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and director of the Social and Environmental Decision-Making (SED) Lab. Van der Linden is familiar with the research but had no role in it."This study provides strong empirical evidence of this phenomenon," said van der Linden, who studies public policy from a behavioral-science perspective. "This finding is important because it suggests that people may not be thinking about long-term changes in climate patterns but rather are paying attention to more salient variations in and impacts of short-term local weather."The study's authors said this information could help governments communicate hurricane risk more effectively to the public. Taking into account that people are more likely to respond to the threat of high winds, for instance, could help agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency motivate the public to adequately prepare for storms. The researchers also recommended that public agencies work to further educate the public about the risk posed by storm surge."Public opinion can make or break policies intended to address climate change and ameliorate damage from storms," Lin said. "Tapping into the state of current perceptions and what drives them will be critical for governments around the world as the impacts of climate change are increasingly felt."The researchers are currently conducting other studies related to climate-change perception, including research on flood adaption and insurance-purchasing behavior in the counties along the Gulf Coast, as well as looking at worldwide perceptions of climate change and the willingness to adopt green-energy technologies. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
August 16, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160816110804.htm | Can we economically outgrow climate change damages? Not for hurricanes we can't | When hurricanes like Katrina in 2005 or Sandy in 2012 impact on highly populated regions they bring about tremendous damages. More than 50 percent of all weather-related economic losses on the globe are caused by damages due to tropical cyclones. Researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) now analyzed the magnitude of future hurricane losses in relation to economic growth. Showcasing the United States they found that financial losses per hurricane could triple by the end of the century in unmitigated climate change, while annual losses could on average rise by a factor of eight. Most importantly and contrary to prevalent opinion, they conclude that economic growth will not be able to counterbalance the increase in damage. | "So far, historical losses due to tropical cyclones have been found to increase less than linearly with a nation's affected gross domestic product (GDP)," Tobias Geiger explains. "However, if you analyze losses with respect to per capita income and population growth separately, this reveals a different picture: Our analysis for the United States shows that high income does not protect against hurricane losses. As the number and intensity of tropical cyclones is projected to increase under unchecked global warming, by the end of the century average hurricane losses with respect to national GDP could triple."The researchers worked with cutting-edge models linking the storm's wind speed, the exposed population, and per capita GDP to reported losses, using a newly designed data set for socio-economic and hazard-related predictors. "We used information about historical hurricane tracks for the Eastern United States to identify the connection between the affected population, average per capital income and associated damages.," Katja Frieler adds. "Finally, we applied this relationship to thousands of potential future hurricane tracks that could affect the Eastern United States until 2100 under different levels of global warming.""Some people hope that a growing economy will be able to compensate for the damages caused by climate change -- that we can outgrow climate change economically instead of mitigating it. But what if damages grow faster than our economy, what if climate impacts hit faster than we are able to adapt?," Anders Levermann says. "We find that this is the case with hurricane damages in the United States, the hope in economic growth as an answer to climate change is ill-founded. While adaptation to unavoidable impacts of global warming is important, climate mitigation remains of vital relevance to prevent or damp still avoidable consequences." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
July 29, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160729143038.htm | Electric grid vulnerabilities in extreme weather areas | Climate and energy scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method to pinpoint which electrical service areas will be most vulnerable as populations grow and temperatures rise. | "For the first time, we were able to apply data at a high enough resolution to be relevant," said ORNL's Melissa Allen, co-author of "Impacts of Climate Change on Sub-regional Electricity Demand and Distribution in the Southern United States," published in Allen and her team developed new algorithms that combine ORNL's unique infrastructure and population datasets with high-resolution climate simulations run on the lab's Titan supercomputer. The integrated approach identifies substations at the neighborhood level and determines their ability to handle additional demand based on predicted changes in climate and population.The new, high-resolution capability can explore the interconnections in complex systems such as critical infrastructure and weather and determine potential pathways to adapt to future global change."These results can affect how future service areas are defined and where new substation capacity within the national grid may need to be located," Allen said.The authors note the study could inform city leaders and utilities when planning for adjustments or upgrades to existing infrastructure. The analysis also helps decision makers prepare resources needed for population movement in response to future extreme weather events, particularly in the Gulf Coast region. After a natural disaster, such as a high intensity hurricane, tens of thousands could be displaced to areas ill-equipped to handle the sudden influx of people for an unknown period of time.For this analysis, the research team examined impacts of population and temperature changes through 2050 in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, but Allen said that the method could be applied to other regions. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
July 14, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160714151858.htm | Tropical cyclones on track to grow more intense as temperatures rise | Powerful tropical cyclones like the super typhoon that lashed Taiwan with 150-mile-per-hour winds last week and then flooded parts of China are expected to become even stronger as the planet warms. That trend hasn't become evident yet, but it will, scientists say. | So far, the warming effects of greenhouse gases on tropical cyclones have been masked, in part by air pollution.Over the past century, tiny airborne particles called aerosols, which cool the climate by absorbing and reflecting sunlight, largely cancelled out the effects of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions when it came to tropical storm intensity, according to a new scientific review paper published this week in the journal That compensating effect won't continue if greenhouse gas warming keeps increasing, the scientists write. Using model simulations, they provide new calculations of the cancelling effects of aerosols and greenhouse gases on tropical cyclones worldwide. They also take a closer look at the still-developing understanding of how climate change will affect tropical cyclones, also known regionally as typhoons or hurricanes."The fact that global warming's fingerprints don't yet jump out at us when we look at hurricanes isn't surprising -- it's what current science tells us we should expect," said lead author Adam Sobel, a professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and School of Engineering. "The same science tells us that those fingerprints will show up eventually in more ultra-powerful storms."The scientists examined a wide range of published analyses of tropical cyclone data and computer modeling, looking specifically at potential intensity, which predicts the maximum intensity that tropical cyclones could reach in a given environment. Their new global calculations of the cancelling effect follow a 2015 study led by Lamont's Mingfang Ting, with Suzana Camargo, also a coauthor on the new paper, that showed similar effects over the North Atlantic, where hurricanes that make landfall in the United States form.Many factors contribute to a tropical cyclone's intensity. At the most basic, the storm's convective strength -- the boiling motion of air rising from the ocean surface to the atmosphere -- depends on the temperature difference between the surface ocean and the upper atmosphere. Computer models that simulate the physics of tropical cyclones suggest that this difference should increase as the climate and sea surface temperatures warm, and that tropical storm strength should increase with it.Less well understood is how climate change should influence the number of tropical cyclones that form each year. Computer models indicate that while the total number of cyclones should decline in a warming climate, more intense, highly destructive storms like Super Typhoon Nepartak are likely to become more common.We have seen harbingers of that change in recent years: Typhoon Haiyan, also known as Yolanda, killed more than 6,300 people as it devastated parts of the Philippines as a Category 5 storm in 2013. Last year, Hurricane Patricia became the second most-intense tropical cyclone on record when its sustained winds reached 215 mph before weakening to hit Mexico with winds still powerful at 150 mph.The scientists' review finds that the largest increases in tropical cyclone potential intensity are expected to be at the margins of the tropics, particularly in the Atlantic and Pacific. The amount of rain that tropical storms bring is also expected to increase as the planet warms, due to increasing water vapor; and coastal flooding from storm surges that accompany tropical storms are expected to become more of a problem as sea levels rise. The scientists also describe a shift in tropical cyclone tracks toward the margins of the tropics, noting that it is unclear if the shift is a response to warming. Simulations for the western North Pacific suggest that it is, at least in part.Two factors make it difficult to detect greenhouse gas-related trends in tropical cyclone intensity, as the authors explain.One is the influence of aerosols. Model calculations indicate that aerosols have about twice the effect of greenhouse gases on a tropical cyclone's potential intensity. So while greenhouse gas levels have been greater than aerosol levels for many decades in terms of absolute magnitude -- which is why the planet has warmed by about 1.5?F since the Industrial Revolution -- they have only recently surpassed the cooling effect of aerosols in terms of their influence on tropical cyclone intensity.The other challenge is natural variability. Tropical cyclones are relatively rare -- the world averages around 90 per year -- and that number fluctuates from year to year and decade to decade, due in large part to natural causes. It is statistically difficult to detect long-term trends within that large natural variability, Sobel said. Satellite records that can monitor tropical storms worldwide also only go back to the 1970s.Scientists at Lamont, including Sobel, Camargo and coauthors Allison Wing and Chia-Ying Lee, are using both observations and computer models to expand understanding of how tropical cyclone behavior has changed and the physical mechanisms by which climate affects extreme weather. Among other projects, they are developing a tropical cyclone risk model that can be used in urban planning that incorporates climate factors in determining the probability of a tropical cyclone making landfall at a given location.The other coauthors of the paper are Michael Tippett of Columbia's School of Engineering, and Timothy Hall of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Funding for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
June 24, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160624101057.htm | Should I stay or should I go? | Millions of people will likely be in harm's way as a new hurricane season unfolds in the United States. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts up to eight hurricanes in the 2016 season, and as many as four major storms with winds of 111 miles per hour or more. | What people do -- or don't do -- to get out of harm's way is of keen interest to disaster and emergency response officials.Plans and contingencies work best when they are based on reliable predictions. Having a good idea of what people are likely to do, when they're likely to do it and how they are likely to go about it helps authorities choose the best evacuation strategy. It gives them useful information about what kind of traffic surge to expect and how best to steer it.Researchers at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center have been studying evacuation data and predictors for years and have published two new papers that may help to improve prediction models used by emergency planners, leading to more efficient evacuations and possibly saving lives.DRC includes scientists from multiple disciplines and collaborates with many others around the world. In these papers, they worked with researchers from Cornell University."It is an interdisciplinary project," said Rachel Davidson, professor of civil and environmental engineering and co-primary investigator with DRC Director Tricia Wachtendorf on two major National Science Foundation grants that have supported the study. "And we're working closely with practitioners to make a link from research to practice."Sociologists, psychologists, engineers and meteorologists all have been part of the work, as have the Federal Emergency Management Agency, North Carolina State Emergency Management and the American Red Cross, Davidson said.The goal is to sharpen planners' insight on how many people may leave from a given area, when they are most likely to make their move and where they are likely to go.It's not easy to guess what a human being will do. The brain processes many factors as it moves toward a decision -- past experience, perception of risk and how it interprets present conditions, to name just a few. Those factors are hard to pin down in the best, most stable of times, let alone when the winds start to howl and the rain starts to pound.Hurricanes, too, can be quite unpredictable, as evidenced by the ever-changing "cone of uncertainty" included in forecasts as storm systems approach.But expansive review of data gathered in prior evacuations reveals patterns that can be analyzed and incorporated in regional models, based on mathematical predictions and controls, to strengthen the reliability of predictions in future storms.That's what the two new papers show. Both draw on data from the eastern part of hurricane-throttled North Carolina, where the Outer Banks and other coastal areas have seen more than their share of evacuation orders.One of the papers, published by "Social and environmental cues influence behavior," said Sarah DeYoung, postdoctoral researcher at DRC who was the lead author of that paper and has just accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Georgia."But we understand, too, the temporal nature of that," Davidson said. "It's not like people make a decision on Day 1 and follow through with that. They see what happens and change their minds, too."The study, based on survey data collected in 2011 through phone interviews with North Carolina residents in Wilmington, Raleigh, Jacksonville and the Outer Banks, looked at respondents' "threshold for evacuation" -- whether they had a high threshold and were less likely to evacuate or a low threshold and more likely to evacuate.Those lines moved a bit, depending on whether the storm discussed was a higher or lower category of strength and whether the evacuation order was mandatory or voluntary.But in general, DeYoung said, white respondents had a higher threshold than non-white respondents, a finding that was particularly interesting given that other studies in the United States suggest that non-whites evacuated later."This was really notable for us," said Wachtendorf, associate professor of sociology and the lead social scientist on the research. "Is it that minority segments of the community are willing to leave but don't always have sufficient resources to do so? Is it because, as other research suggests, they have less trust in officials and, particularly after what happened after Hurricane Katrina, they believe they can't rely on officials if they stay? It really points to an area where more research is needed."Respondents who had ignored previous evacuation warnings were also more likely to ignore an order in the future.And DeYoung said most people saw wind as more dangerous than water, but in reality it is the storm surge and flooding that causes more deaths. Most hurricane-related deaths occur in areas where people decided not to evacuate. Wachtendorf said this could lead people to dismiss the threat of lower category storms, with relatively lower wind speeds, despite the threat flooding can pose.One recommendation is to increase public awareness of the risk associated with drowning and flooding versus the probability of death caused by wind damage.Research in progress points to other important factors in the decision-making process, including concern about traffic jams, caring for pets and livestock, and fear of crime in public shelters."It's a moving target," Davidson said. "There are challenges in science and challenges in engineering. But understanding people's behavior is one of the most challenging parts.""That's one reason why the interdisciplinary approach is so valuable," said Wachtendorf.The second paper, published on Science Direct in the journal The work by the civil engineers on the project used data collected by the social scientists to inform many of the assumptions for their models.Having reliable models puts the power of the knowledge into useful form for planners and helps them shape effective, efficient evacuation plans that could save lives in the future. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
June 10, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160610094739.htm | Average 'dead zone' predicted for Gulf of Mexico in 2016 | Scientists forecast that this year's Gulf of Mexico dead zone--an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and marine life -- will be approximately 5,898 square miles or about the size of Connecticut, the same range as it has averaged over the last several years. | The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico affects nationally important commercial and recreational fisheries. Hypoxic zones or "dead zones" are caused by high levels of nutrients, primarily from activities such as industrialized agriculture and inadequate wastewater treatment.The low oxygen levels cannot support most marine life and habitats in near-bottom waters. Organisms that can flee the dead zones leave the area, while others which cannot leave are stressed or die of suffocation. Reducing nutrients flowing to the Gulf would help the situation since, under normal conditions, this area contains a diversity of marine life, critical habitats, and a number of key fisheries."Dead zones are a real threat to Gulf fisheries and the communities that rely on them," said Russell Callender, Ph.D., assistant NOAA administrator for the National Ocean Service. "We'll continue to work with our partners to advance the science to reduce that threat. One way we're doing that is by using new tools and resources, like better predictive models, to provide better information to communities and businesses."The NOAA-sponsored Gulf of Mexico hypoxia forecast is improving due to advancements of individual models and an increase in the number of models used for the forecast. Forecasts based on multiple models are called ensemble forecasts and are commonly used in hurricane and other weather forecasts.This year marks the second year that a four-model forecast has been used. The four individual model predictions ranged from 5,204 to 6,823 square miles, and had a collective predictive interval of 3,200 to 8,597 square miles. The forecast assumes typical weather conditions, and the actual dead zone could be disrupted by hurricanes or tropical storms. Data from these four models are used to determine and meet the nutrient reduction targets set by the interagency Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force.The ensemble of models was developed by NOAA-sponsored modeling teams and researchers at the University of Michigan, Louisiana State University, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences/College of William and Mary, Texas A&M University, North Carolina State University, and the United States Geological Survey. The hypoxia forecast is part of a larger NOAA effort to deliver ecological forecasts that support human health and well-being, coastal economies, and coastal and marine stewardship.The Gulf of Mexico hypoxia forecast is based on nutrient runoff and river and stream data from USGS. USGS estimates that 146,000 metric tons of nitrate and 20,800 metric tons of phosphorus flowed down the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers into the Gulf of Mexico in May 2016. This is about 12 percent above the long-term (1980-2015) average for nitrogen, and 25 percent above the long-term average for phosphorus.USGS operates more than 2,700 real-time stream gauges, 60 real-time nitrate sensors, and collects water quality data at long-term stations throughout the Mississippi River basin to track how nutrient loads are changing over time."By expanding the real-time nitrate monitoring network with partners throughout the basin, USGS is improving our understanding of where, when, and how much nitrate is pulsing out of small streams and large rivers and ultimately emptying to the Gulf of Mexico," said Sarah J. Ryker, Ph.D., acting deputy assistant secretary for water and science at the Department of the Interior. "The forecast puts these data to additional use by showing how nutrient loading fuels the hypoxic zone size."The confirmed size of the 2016 Gulf dead zone will be released in early August, following a monitoring survey from July 24 to August 1, conducted on a NOAA vessel and funded through a partnership between NOAA, Northern Gulf Institute, and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
June 7, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607151706.htm | Storm fingerprints show past and future | Human fingerprints are unique identifiers. The wiggles, curves and ripples cannot be copied or duplicated and provide a distinct signature that represents an individual. | In the same way, strong storms -- such as Superstorm Sandy -- can leave a signature in the form of ripples on the seafloor.Known as ripple bedforms, these small, dynamic swells are formed when waves generate currents that oscillate back and forth on the seafloor, stirring up sediments and sand. The larger the distance between successive waves on the water's surface, theoretically, the larger the distance between the peaks of the ripples on the ocean floor below.According to Carter DuVal, a University of Delaware doctoral student studying oceanography, being able to measure and interpret these ripples can help scientists understand storms that have already happened, and also can help scientists model and predict how future storms will behave.DuVal is the lead author of a paper recently published in the journal Co-authors on the paper include Art Trembanis, associate professor of oceanography in UD's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, and Adam Skarke, a former student of Trembanis who is now an assistant professor of geology at Mississippi State University.The work is part of a wider study, started by Trembanis and colleagues in 2012 and sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, to examine the ecosystem and to create detailed maps of the seafloor at Redbird Reef, an artificial reef about 16 miles off the coast of the Indian River Inlet. The humanmade structure is comprised of old subway cars, tugboats, tires and military tract vehicles that provide a habitat for marine organisms, while encouraging recreational fishing and diving.The researchers have mapped Redbird Reef every year since 2008, except 2014. In 2012, they placed sensors and other instruments at Redbird Reef just prior to Hurricane Sandy to measure waves, currents and sand formations on the seafloor. During the height of the storm, the instruments recorded waves over 24 feet high and currents rushing back and forth across the seafloor at 5.2 feet per second.According to Trembanis, in order to predict erosion, storm surge and overwash at the beach, scientists must correctly predict how a wave will change as it moves across the continental shelf. This is particularly true on the East Coast, which is characterized by a broad, shallow continental shelf."At practical levels, if we are going to appropriately predict and model how storms are going to behave, we need to be able to determine ripple parameters, such as wavelength and orientation to the shoreline, with accuracy. Until we began using a fingerprint algorithm, we didn't have strong enough tools to do this," said Trembanis.Storms like Jonas, Joaquin and Sandy, he continued, all contained waves so long that they started to feel the ripples on the ocean floor almost 85 miles offshore. The ripples slow the waves and currents down, fundamentally changing the way they bend and lose energy as they travel across the ocean shelf -- and ultimately, how the waves break and end up on the beach.Part of the fingerprint algorithm's processing -- or job -- is to filter out areas that are featureless and focus only on areas with texture or directionality. This strengthened the researchers' data analysis because it only focuses on areas with ripples.The algorithm can also tell scientists where there aren't ripples, which may indicate areas where there is "scour," meaning erosion, or hidden objects like a mine, pipeline, shipwreck or even unexploded ordinance. New developmentsAccording to DuVal, existing models predict that when a storm begins to wane, the ripples will reduce in size due to the smaller wave conditions. However, using the fingerprint algorithm to analyze data collected during Hurricane Sandy at Redbird Reef revealed that the ripples actually froze at the highest energy of the storm."So not only were we seeing a record of the storm, but of the most energetic part of the storm. This is very important for recording the storm's dynamics," explained DuVal.DuVal's work has focused on extending the fingerprint algorithm to help the researchers analyze the appearance of the ripples, specifically, whether the ripples were straight or curved or something else. Revisiting Redbird Reef multiple times over a year to take measurements and looking at these minute details over large areas, he explained, can help scientists understand a storm's long-lasting effects, especially how the ripples change over time.Months after Superstorm Sandy, for example, many of the smaller ripples that were initially present had disappeared, and larger ripples had been smoothed out into what Trembanis calls "relic ripples.""Relic ripples that are left behind can become the starting point for the next storm, or because they are somewhat rigid, they may slow down future storms," Trembanis said. Understanding their directionality, he continued, is important to distinguishing between the two.Running a finger across a 3-D printed model of a portion of the reef created from bathymetric sonar images and other data captured after the storm, DuVal is acutely aware of the widespread geographical and structural changes wrought by Superstorm Sandy."It gives you a perspective that you cannot get by looking at a two- or three-dimensional map on a screen," says DuVal. "Not only can we look at the surface, but also the texture too."It also reminds DuVal and Trembanis of the timeliness of the work they are doing.According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, increased greenhouse gas concentrations are expected to "increase the frequency, intensity and/or duration of extreme events.""For the Mid-Atlantic, nor'easters really are the dominant storm. What we've seen by looking back at the records is that the energy level conditions we measured during Hurricane Sandy have a two and a half to three year recurrence interval," Trembanis said.Coincidentally, the researchers recently detected major changes at the Redbird site from winter storm Jonas, including some of the largest ripples they have ever seen. A large Navy barge that previously has been unmoved during Sandy and any other storm also appeared to have been rotated approximately 60 degrees and shifted approximately 160 feet by the January storm according to recent images.One thing is for sure: the UD researchers will be keeping an eye on the ripples and what they might reveal about the unprecedented weather patterns ahead. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
May 25, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160525220541.htm | Scientists explain the art of creating digital hurricanes | Every day, scientists at NASA work on creating better hurricanes -- on a computer screen. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, a team of scientists spends its days incorporating millions of atmospheric observations, sophisticated graphic tools and lines of computer code to create computer models simulating the weather and climate conditions responsible for hurricanes. Scientists use these models to study the complex environment and structure of tropical storms and hurricanes. | Getting the simulations right has huge societal implications, which is why one Goddard scientist chose this line of work."Freshwater floods, often caused by hurricanes, are the number one cause of death by natural disasters in the world, even above earthquakes and volcanoes," tropical meteorologist Oreste Reale with Goddard's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) said. "Seeing how the research we do could have an impact on these things is very rewarding."Improved models can lead to better prediction and warning for these natural disasters, mitigating loss of life and property.Getting to the point of being able to accurately study hurricanes using computer models, however, is not easy. Because hurricanes are such complex storm systems, capturing their full nature in detail using a computer simulation is far from simple."We need to add complexity all the time and nobody here is afraid of doing that," Reale said. "You don't want a simple solution. If it's simple, chances are it's not true."Adding complexity can include updating the models, incorporating data from new satellites, replacing old satellites and more.Reale and his colleague, Goddard tropical meteorologist Marangelly Fuentes, have more than 25 years' combined experience looking at modeled storms. In fact, Fuentes was Reale's student intern while she was earning her doctorate degree at Howard University in Washington, D.C. They belong to a team in the GMAO whose goal is to assess whether new data types are used efficiently in computer models, and to ensure that changes and updates improve the performance of models and their data assimilation systems compared to previous versions. Data assimilation refers to the process through which data or observations are incorporated into an existing model."Mostly I look at tropical forecasting and the analysis of tropical cyclones in the models, so we monitor how the different models are performing with tropical storms," Fuentes said.This includes comparing the performance of GMAO's weather and climate models with others in the U.S. and around the world. Fuentes looks at current versions of the GMAO model and compares them with newer, updated versions in development. By comparing the results of newer simulations on past, well-known storms, she can verify if the updated model version will be more effective at predicting the track and intensity of future storms."We are able to use cases like Hurricane Katrina to run tests and show us how we can improve, or how this new change affected the forecast or the analysis of the storm system," Fuentes said.The closer the results are to the actual behavior of the storm, the more accurate the model.Fuentes has worked extensively on the intensity prediction of Hurricane Katrina. Weather models in 2005 -- the year Katrina struck the Gulf Coast with devastating results -- predicted that the storm's pressure would reach as low as 955 millibars, significantly underestimating how low Katrina's atmospheric pressure would get, and therefore the storm's intensity. Observed data show that pressure in Hurricane Katrina's eye reached a minimum of 902 millibars, one of the 10 lowest pressure readings on record for an Atlantic hurricane. The most modern model produced by the GMAO, which Fuentes has been analyzing, can produce a model of Katrina's pressure much closer to the actual observed levels from 2005.Changes to these predictions are caused by improvements in data assimilation and model resolution, made possible by increased computer processing power. Improving the resolution of the model works similarly to increasing the resolution of a photo. The more pixels, or dots of color, in a square inch of a photo, the higher the resolution. High-resolution photos appear sharper and capture more detail than their low-resolution counterparts. Likewise, higher-resolution models produce more detailed simulations of hurricanes, giving researchers a better understanding of their behavior."In the model we basically transform Earth's atmosphere into little 'cubes' and in each cube the fundamental equations controlling motion, energy and continuity of the atmosphere are solved," Reale said. "The smaller the size of the cube, the more realistic the representation of the atmosphere."Reale said that high model resolution is a critical factor in capturing hurricanes accurately. Luckily, there has been much improvement to model resolution in the past 10 years.In 2005, the record year of 27 named tropical storms or hurricanes in the Atlantic, the size of the "cubes" in GMAO's model was about 31 miles (50 km). Today, the resolution is three to four times higher at about 8 miles (12.5 km), giving scientists a much clearer and more detailed look at the state of the atmosphere.Of course, Reale said, there's still work to be done. "There's no such thing as perfect in research and science, but there is certainly a big improvement for the intensity that contemporary models could predict if they had to face a situation like that again," he said.Reale believes this is the team to do it. "I feel that I'm part of an organization that is extremely successful in facing many different aspects of science," he said. "There are people from all over the world, and I'm sure that whatever question or issue I may have, there's someone who knows the answer in this building. I can tap into the knowledge and experience of so many people." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
May 25, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160525132603.htm | Early use of 'hurricane hunter' data improves hurricane intensity predictions | Data collected via airplane when a hurricane is developing can improve hurricane intensity predictions by up to 15 percent, according to Penn State researchers who have been working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Hurricane Center to put the new technique into practice. | Prior to this study, no hurricane prediction model incorporated the vast amount of data collected by 'hurricane hunters,' which are NOAA or U.S. Air Force airborne reconnaissance missions that fly into hurricanes to collect data."Hurricane hunting has existed in the U.S. since the 1940s, and planes have included on-board radar since the 1970s," said Yonghui Weng, meteorology research associate, Penn State. "Unfortunately, before our study, only a small portion of this radar data was being used in predictive hurricane models. Their main use was to probe the intensity and structure of the storm, and this information is given to forecasters."Hurricane hunters initiate their first mission as soon as the hurricane is within flying distance, and they continue to fly missions to collect data throughout the duration of the hurricane. This data is fed into statistical and dynamical models that generate many variations of possible hurricane paths and intensity."Typically, aircrews use three different types of equipment -- radar, on-plane sensors and devices dropped into the hurricane called dropsondes -- to collect data on the physical structure, wind speed, direction, temperature and moisture of storms," said Fuqing Zhang, professor of meteorology, Penn State. "Because of technological advances in data processing, statistical algorithm and scientific computing, we are now able to assimilate more of this data into prediction models than previously."For example, prior to this study, the National Hurricane Center's hurricane prediction model used data collected from the outside portion of the storm but not the inner core.Predicting a hurricane's path has increased in accuracy in the past few decades, but predicting intensity has been a longstanding challenge for researchers. Weng and Zhang investigated whether better use of hurricane hunter data could lead to improved intensity forecasts. They present their findings in an invited paper in the August issue of the Using Penn State's real-time hurricane prediction system, developed by Zhang's team, in particular Weng, they 'hindcasted,' or retroactively forecasted, the intensity and path of 23 hurricanes and tropical cyclones occurring between 2008 and 2012. Using one forecast with reconnaissance data and one without, they compared their predictions with the storm's actual path and intensity. Then in 2013 Weng and Zhang tested the use of reconnaissance data in real time with 11 storms.For 2008 through 2012, the team found that airborne reconnaissance data reduced forecast errors by more than 10 percent for both wind speed and sea level pressure, two major components of a hurricane's intensity. In 2013, the Penn State model reduced forecast errors for wind speed and sea level pressure by between 5 and 15 percent, compared to existing models."In our study, we have demonstrated the benefit of integrating or incorporating reconnaissance data at an early stage into high-resolution weather prediction models through advanced data assimilation," said Zhang. "Improving forecasts even 5 to 15 percent could translate to billions of dollars in savings, and this also could help agencies provide more notice to people if they are in the path of a storm."This is the third major hurricane prediction model improvement Zhang's team has investigated in recent years that has been transitioning to practice. They also showed that an ensemble-based approach, in which many variations of models are run to show uncertainty of predictions, and the use of on-plane Doppler improves forecasts, could improve predictions.The team is now investigating whether better use of satellite data can further improve hurricane predictions.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and NASA supported this work. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
May 2, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160502161841.htm | Hurricanes key to carbon uptake by forests | While hurricanes are a constant source of worry for residents of the southeastern United States, new research suggests that they have a major upside -- counteracting global warming. | Previous research from Duke environmental engineer Ana Barros demonstrated that the regular landfall of tropical cyclones is vital to the region's water supply and can help mitigate droughts.Now, a new study from Barros reveals that the increase in forest photosynthesis and growth made possible by tropical cyclones in the southeastern United States captures hundreds of times more carbon than is released by all vehicles in the U.S. in a given year.The study was published online on April 20, 2016, in the "Our results show that, while hurricanes can cause flooding and destroy city infrastructure, there are two sides to the story," said Barros, the James L. Meriam Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University. "The other side is that hurricanes recharge the aquifers and have an enormous impact on photosynthesis and taking up carbon from the atmosphere."In the study, Lauren Lowman, a doctoral student in Barros's laboratory, used a hydrological computer model to simulate the ecological impacts of tropical cyclones from 2004-2007. The earlier years of that time period had a high number of tropical cyclone landfall events, while the latter years experienced relatively few.By comparing those disparate years to simulations of a year without tropical cyclone events, Lowman was able to calculate the effect tropical cyclones have on the rates of photosynthesis and carbon uptake in forests of the southeastern United States."It's easy to make general statements about how much of an impact something like additional rainfall can have on the environment," said Lowman. "But we really wanted to quantify the amount of carbon uptake that you can relate to tropical cyclones."According to Barros and Lowman, it is difficult to predict what effects climate change will have on the region's future. Even if the number of tropical cyclones that form in the Atlantic increases, that doesn't guarantee that the number making landfall will also rise. And long-term forecasts for the region's temperature and rainfall currently show less change than normal year-to-year variability.But no matter what the future brings, one thing is clear -- the regularity and number of tropical cyclones making landfall will continue to be vital."There are a lot of regional effects competing with large worldwide changes that make it very hard to predict what climate change will bring to the southeastern United States," said Barros. "If droughts do become worse and we don't have these regular tropical cyclones, the impact will be very negative. And regardless of climate change, our results are yet one more very good reason to protect these vast forests."This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation Coupled Human and Natural Systems Program (CNH-1313799) and an earlier grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NA08OAR4310701). | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
April 27, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160427081952.htm | Cutting-edge telepresence technology helped investigators find the El Faro | Federal investigators announced today that they found the "black box" that could reveal why the El Faro cargo ship sank off the Bahamas in a hurricane last fall -- and that the University of Rhode Island played a key role in the discovery. | URI's internationally acclaimed Inner Space Center at the Graduate School of Oceanography provided telepresence technology -- and its expertise -- to assist with the search.Dwight F. Coleman, center director, worked closely with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to install telepresence technology on the research vessel Atlantis, the Woods Hole ship that conducted the search."Finding an object about the size of a basketball almost 3 miles under the surface of the sea is a remarkable achievement," said NTSB Chairman Christopher A. Hart. "It would not have been possible without the information gained during the first survey of the wreckage and the equipment and support provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, the University of Rhode Island, and the many other partners involved in this effort."Coleman said URI's "cutting-edge telepresence technology helped provide critical clues to investigators to determine why the El Faro sank. There's some mystery as to what happened, so finding the voyage data recorder could reveal key details about the critical moments before the sinking.''The 790-foot cargo ship, loaded with shipping containers and cars, sank Oct. 31 during Hurricane Joaquin on its way from Jacksonville, Fla., to San Juan, Puerto Rico. All 33 crew members died, making it one of the worst disasters involving an American cargo vessel in decades.The ship was found a month later in about 15,000 feet of water, but the voyage data recorder -- a "black box" type device -- that could provide clues was never located.So far, video has shown that the two upper decks, including the navigation bridge, had separated from the El Faro's hull and were about a half mile away on the ocean floor.On April 16 and 17, Coleman installed ship-to-shore telecommunications equipment on the Atlantis, and he supervised an upgrade to the ship's satellite-tracking antenna to allow high-definition video broadcasts to stream ashore.He also helped install telecommunications equipment at NTSB's headquarters in Washington, D.C. to receive the broadcasts and enable two-way communication."My efforts allowed NTSB investigators and other experts on shore to participate in the day-to-day search activities and identify the voyage data recorder on the seafloor," he said.The data recorder is crucial to the investigation: It should have recorded audio from the bridge and information about the ship's speed and course.Woods Hole, partnering with NTSB, searched a 13.5-square-mile debris area in the Atlantic Ocean for the last few days or so. The team used an autonomous underwater vehicle -- known as Sentry -- to collect sonar data and high-resolution photographs of the debris.URI's telepresence technology provides a better way to transfer the images to on-shore investigators who can identify objects for recovery or closer inspection."We hope our technology can be used in future investigations -- other shipping accidents or plane disappearances in the ocean," said Coleman. "We hope to use the technology to accelerate search and recovery operations and make them more affordable. If you can find what you're looking for faster, you're saving expense and solving the case sooner."The Inner Space Center, located on URI's Narragansett Bay campus, was developed through the efforts of marine explorer and URI Professor Robert Ballard. Largely funded by a bond issue approved by Rhode Island voters in 2004, the facility opened in 2010.The center's mission is to expand participation in seagoing oceanographic research in real time by connecting scientists on ships with their colleagues on shore. It's modeled after Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston."What we do at our center is similar to what NASA does to communicate with astronauts in space," said Coleman. "Thanks to satellites and advanced Internet technologies, we can interact with scientists live onboard and participate in decision making in real time."The center -- the only one of its kind in the world for ocean research -- routinely supports the research missions of the R/V Endeavor, a URI research vessel, the missions of the exploration vessel Nautilus -- Robert Ballard's research ship -- and the Okeanos Explorer, which is based at Quonset Point, R.I., and owned and operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
April 5, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160405094231.htm | Threat of climate change found to be key psychological and emotional stressor | Climate change is a significant threat to the health of Americans, creating unprecedented health problems in areas where they might not have previously occurred, according to a report released April 4 by the White House. | The report, "The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment," was developed by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and outlines the impacts climate change has on human health, including mental health and well-being. Contributing to this report and its findings, were doctors from the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU), to include the center's director and chair of the USU Department of Psychiatry, Dr. Robert J. Ursano, and assistant chair of the USU Department of Psychiatry, U.S. Public Health Service Cmdr. (Dr.) Joshua Morganstein.The threat of climate change has been found to be a key psychological and emotional stressor, and consequences can range from minimal stress and distress to clinical disorders, such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and suicidal thoughts, according to the report.Messages from the media as well as public communication about climate change, can affect perceptions of physical and societal risks, consequently affecting mental health and well-being, for example. An estimated 40 percent of Americans report hearing about climate change in the media at least once a month, and about half of Americans reported being worried about climate change in 2015, according to a survey, the report states. In more extreme cases, such as natural disasters causing injuries and deaths, damaged homes and communities, individuals may experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, grief, and depression. All of these reactions have the potential to interfere with the individual's functioning and well-being, according to the report. The majority of affected people recover over time, although some will develop chronic psychological problems, according to the report. Among those most at risk for poor mental health outcomes are some groups previously shown to suffer high rates of disaster related psychological problems including farmers, immigrants, those with limited mobility, those living in coastal areas, those from Indigenous communities or tribes, and veterans.Following exposure to Hurricane Katrina, veterans with pre-existing mental illness were at an almost 7 times greater risk for developing any additional mental illness, compared to those veterans without a pre-existing mental illness. Following hurricanes, increased levels of PTSD have been experienced by individuals who report less community support and help from neighbors and others.Overall, the report continues, those who have been directly affected by a climate- or weather-related disaster are at increased incidence of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Increases in both suicidal thoughts (from 2.8% to 6.4%) and actual suicidal plans (from 1.0% to 2.5%) were observed in residents 18 months after Hurricane Katrina. Following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a study of internally displaced women living in temporary housing found reported rates of suicide attempt and completion to be 78.6 times and 14.7 times the regional average, respectively.Emerging evidence also shows those who are actively involved in climate change adaptation, or mitigation, might experience considerable health and well-being benefits, the report adds. These multiple psychological and environmental benefits do not necessarily minimize distress; however, when people do have distress related to relevant media exposure, or to thinking about climate change, taking action to address the issue can buffer against distress, the report states. Such engagement both addresses the threat and helps manage the emotional responses as people come to terms with -- and adjust their understandings and lives in the context of -- climate change. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
March 24, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160324192435.htm | GOES-R satellite could provide better data for hurricane prediction | The launch of the GOES-R geostationary satellite in October 2016 could herald a new era for predicting hurricanes, according to Penn State researchers. The wealth of information from this new satellite, at time and space scales not previously possible, combined with advanced statistical hurricane prediction models, could enable more accurate predictions in the future. | "For decades, geostationary satellites such as the GOES series have been the primary tool to monitor severe weather like storms and hurricanes in real time," said Fuqing Zhang, professor of meteorology and director of Penn State's Center for Advanced Data Assimilation and Predictability Techniques. "They have helped people see what's going on in the present, but, until now, we as a community have not been able to tap into these resources to guide us to predict future severe weather."Geostationary satellites like the GOES series orbit the Earth at a fixed location, taking snapshots of cloud formations and other meteorological information. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates GOES with contributions from NASA.Historically, two main challenges exist when using satellite data for hurricane predictions -- the type and amount of data collected. Satellites do not directly measure many quantities related to a hurricane's intensity, such as surface pressure, wind speeds, temperature and water vapor beneath the cloudy regions of the hurricane eyewall. They do, however, collect data known as brightness temperature, which show how much radiation is emitted by objects on Earth and in the atmosphere at different infrared frequencies. Because all objects naturally emit and absorb different amounts of radiation at different frequencies, the complexity of data poses challenges to researchers hoping to use these data for hurricane prediction models."At some frequencies water vapor absorbs moderate amounts of radiation passing through it, at other frequencies it absorbs most of that radiation and at other frequencies it absorbs hardly any at all. Unlike water vapor, clouds strongly absorb radiation at all of these frequencies," said Eugene Clothiaux, professor of meteorology. "Comparing measurements at different frequencies leads to information about water vapor and clouds at different altitudes above the Earth. This begins to tell us about the physical structure of water vapor fields and clouds, including those in the area around a hurricane."Using brightness temperature satellite data to improve model forecasts of hurricanes is not straightforward. Brightness temperature information is a complex mixture related to the ground, atmospheric water vapor and clouds. The team had to develop a sophisticated analysis and modeling scheme to extract information in useful ways for model forecasts.Zhang, Masashi Minamide, graduate student in meteorology, and Clothiaux demonstrated in a pilot study that it is becoming feasible to use brightness data. They found definitive correlations between measurements of brightness temperature and information about the storm -- wind speed and sea level pressure underneath the hurricane. They report their results in the current issue of Using data from GOES-13, the team completed a proof-of-concept experiment, analyzing data from Hurricane Karl in 2010. They used the Penn State real-time hurricane analysis and prediction system that Zhang and his team have been developing and refining for nearly a decade."Hurricane prediction models work by chunking individual blocks of the hurricane and this starts from the initial information that is fed into the model," said Zhang. "We then run an ensemble of possible outcomes for the hurricane using different variables to estimate uncertainty and this tells us how the hurricane might behave. If we are able to use a higher resolution for the initial state, this could allow us to vastly improve hurricane predictions in the future."GOES-13 provides data at a resolution of 2.5 miles, and GOES-R will increase that to under 0.6 miles for some frequencies of brightness temperature. The increase in resolution is especially important because of the size of hurricanes. The eyewall, the layer of clouds surrounding the eye, varies in size but is roughly 6 miles thick. Using GOES-13 brightness temperatures with 2.5-mile resolution, the eyewall is often grouped together with other parts of the storm, with only one or two brightness temperature measurements from only the eyewall itself. A 0.6 mile resolution brightness temperature measurement would allow for up to 10 eyewall measurements to be fed into prediction models as separate chunks of information instead of grouped together with other parts of the storm.This new data source could have implications on the longstanding challenge of predicting hurricane intensity, Zhang said. Researchers know that wind speed and other levels of activity near the eye of the hurricane are linked to future intensity, but actually collecting these data is difficult. Today, NOAA uses airborne reconnaissance to collect data, but this is only possible when the storm is within flying distance. Satellites that constantly monitor the oceans at high spatial and temporal resolution and with many frequencies of brightness temperature, like GOES-R, could remove that constraint."Geostationary satellites are there all the time, which makes them ideal for capturing the initial and evolving states of hurricanes, including the crucial information in the cloudy region of the storm," said Zhang. "Using satellite data more effectively could potentially revolutionize hurricane monitoring and prediction for many years." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
March 11, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160311133516.htm | Science can now link climate change with some extreme weather events | Extreme weather events like floods, heat waves and droughts can devastate communities and populations worldwide. Recent scientific advances have enabled researchers to confidently say that the increased intensity and frequency of some, but not all, of these extreme weather events is influenced by human-induced climate change, according to an international National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report released March 11. | "In the past, many scientists have been cautious of attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change. People frequently ask questions such as, 'Did climate change cause Hurricane Sandy?' Science can't answer that because there are so many relevant factors for hurricanes. What this report is saying is that we can attribute an increased magnitude or frequency of some extreme weather events to climate change," said David Titley, professor of practice in Penn State's Department of Meteorology and founding director of Penn State's Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, who chaired the committee that wrote the report.The committee found that scientists can now confidently attribute some heat waves and cold events, and to a lesser degree droughts and extreme rainfall, to human-caused climate change. Even a decade ago, many scientists argued that research could not confidently tie any specific weather events to climate change, which the committee reports today is no longer true today."If we can actually understand how and why frequencies or magnitudes change of extreme events are changing, those are two components of risk. Understanding that risk is crucial for governments and businesses. For example, if you're managing a business, you may need to know whether there may be more droughts in the future because that may impact supply chain logistics and, ultimately, your bottom dollar," said Titley.Scientific confidence for attributing extreme weather events is a three-legged stool, said Titley. To confidently link specific weather events to climate change, researchers need an understanding of the underlying physical causes of weather events, enough observational data to place a specific event within a historical context and the ability to replicate an event with computer models. For example, when examining hurricanes and typhoons, the lack of a high-quality, long-term historical record, uncertainty regarding the impact of climate change on storm frequency and inability to accurately simulate these storms in most global climate models raises significant challenges when attributing assessing the impact of climate change on any single storm.Attributing the cause of extreme weather to climate change or other factors can "enhance scientists' ability to accurately predict and project future weather and climatic states," said Titley. Predicting both the frequency and intensity of extreme events -- those that are rare in a location -- could allow society to lessen their impact and potentially avoid loss of life and destruction.The committee identified research priorities to further enhance the scientific community's ability to attribute specific extreme weather events to climate change. In addition to endorsing action on relevant items outlined by the World Climate Research Programme in 2014, the report recommends developing transparent community standards for attributing classes of extreme events, and formulating systematic criteria for selecting events to be studied. The committee also recommends that some future event attribution activities could be incorporated into an integrated weather-to-climate forecasting efforts on a broad range of timescales, with an ultimate goal of providing predictive risk-based forecasts of extreme events at lead times of days to seasons.The report can be accessed at: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
March 8, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160308133100.htm | Why Hurricane Irene fizzled as it neared New Jersey in 2011 | A dynamic process that cools the coastal ocean and can weaken hurricanes was discovered as Hurricane Irene made landfall in New Jersey, according to a Rutgers University-led study published today. | The study's findings could help reduce the uncertainty in hurricane intensity forecasts for hurricanes and typhoons that cross coastal ocean waters before striking populated shorelines.Hurricane track forecasts have steadily improved over the last two decades, but improvements in hurricane intensity forecasts have lagged."This is a missing piece required to close the intensity gap for land-falling mid-Atlantic hurricanes in summer," said Greg Seroka, a study coauthor and doctoral candidate in Rutgers' Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences.The study, published online in "We used IOOS to assemble an unprecedented view of a land-falling hurricane during the highly stratified summer season. We discovered new processes responsible for rapid ocean cooling that reduce storm intensities," said Scott Glenn, the study's lead author and a professor at Rutgers.Stratification is when the ocean is divided into a warm surface water layer and a cold bottom layer in summer.While accurate forecasts of Irene's track provided time for preparations and coastal evacuations, the top wind speeds in Irene's official forecasts along the mid-Atlantic coast were too high. Uncertainties in intensity forecasts can lead to unnecessary preparation costs, future public skepticism about storm warnings, and other impacts.Many people did not immediately heed the warnings for Hurricane Sandy in 2012 because Irene wasn't as bad as forecast. Irene weakened to tropical storm strength just before it hit New Jersey.Incorporating coastal ocean water conditions in forecasts of storm intensity and impacts will be increasingly critical in the Earth's mid-latitude areas as sea levels rise and peak tropical cyclone intensities migrate toward the poles, according to the study.Rutgers researchers launched the study as Hurricane Irene cruised up the East Coast in late August 2011. They collected data via satellite, radar, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offshore buoys and a Slocum autonomous underwater glider located about 12 miles southeast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.They found that Irene's winds mixed the coastal ocean's warm surface layer and cold bottom layer, causing rapid cooling ahead of Irene's eye."The mid-Atlantic's extensive network of surface current mapping radars indicated that the strong winds on the leading edge of the storm set up the circulation pattern that cooled the ocean surface," said Rutgers' Hugh Roarty, study coauthor and regional coordinator for the radar network."Then the ocean and atmospheric models confirmed the forcing mechanisms for the cooling process and its impact on the storm," said Travis Miles, assistant research professor at Rutgers and study coauthor."Satellite imagery from before and after the storm revealed that the ocean surface cooled up to 11 degrees Celsius, or 20 degrees Fahrenheit," said Oscar Schofield, a Rutgers professor and study coauthor.Josh Kohut, another coauthor and Rutgers associate professor, leads a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and N.J. Department of Environmental Protection marine water monitoring program that helped make the discovery. "A U.S. EPA- and N.J. DEP-funded underwater glider demonstrated that most of the cooling took place ahead of Irene's eye," he said.Robert Forney, a Rutgers undergraduate who participated in the study, said the researchers subsequently "examined the 30-year historical record and found that the cooling occurred in every hurricane that crossed the mid-Atlantic coastal waters in summer."That included 11 storms from 1985 to 2015."We then looked at typhoons in Asia, and found extensive cooling occurred in Super Typhoon Muifa as it crossed the Yellow Sea" in 2011, said Yi Xu, a study coauthor who earned a Ph.D. at Rutgers and is now a researcher at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China.Another coauthor is Fei Yu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Qingdao, China, who used buoy data to confirm the rapid cooling ahead of Muifa's eye.The study was funded by the NOAA-led U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System through the Mid-Atlantic Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observing System, the NOAA Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region through the Disaster Recovery Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the N.J. Department of Environmental Protection, and the N.J. Board of Public Utilities. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
March 7, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160307152723.htm | Shipwrecks, tree rings reveal Caribbean hurricanes in buccaneer era | Records of Spanish shipwrecks combined with tree-ring records show the period 1645 to 1715 had the fewest Caribbean hurricanes since 1500, according to new University of Arizona-led research. The study is the first to use shipwrecks as a proxy for hurricane activity. | The researchers found a 75 percent reduction in the number of Caribbean hurricanes from 1645-1715, a time with little sunspot activity and cool temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere."We're the first to use shipwrecks to study hurricanes in the past," said lead author Valerie Trouet, an associate professor in the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. "By combining shipwreck data and tree-ring data, we are extending the Caribbean hurricane record back in time and that improves our understanding of hurricane variability."Although global climate models indicate hurricanes will be more intense as the climate warms, those models are not yet good at making regional predictions, Trouet said. Learning more about how hurricanes correlated with climate for the past 500 years may lead to better regional predictions of hurricanes."We're providing information that can help those models become more precise," she said.What is now the U.S. National Hurricane Center did not begin keeping records of Caribbean hurricanes until 1850, she said. Researchers have used lake sediments to develop a record of hurricanes over the past centuries, but these data provide only century-level resolution.The new research provides an annual record of Caribbean hurricanes going back to the year 1500 -- shortly after Christopher Columbus first reached the Caribbean.Ship traffic between Spain and the Caribbean became commonplace. Spain kept detailed records of the comings and goings of ships--at the time, ships returning with gold and other goods provided the income for the Spanish kingdom. Storms were the major reason that ships wrecked in the Caribbean.Figuring out how climate change affects hurricane activity is important for emergency management planning. For U.S. hurricanes from 1970 to 2002, other investigators estimated the damages cost $57 billion in 2015 dollars.The team's paper, "Shipwreck Rates Reveal Caribbean Tropical Cyclone Response to Past Radiative Forcing," is scheduled to be published online by the Trouet's co-authors are Grant Harley of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg and Marta Domínguez-Delmás of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Lugo, Spain.The University of Southern Mississippi, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and an Agnese N. Haury Visiting Scholar Fellowship supported the research.Trouet and her coauthors hatched the idea for the study while sitting on the patio of Tucson's Hotel Congress. The three scientists were attending the Second American Dendrochronology Conference, which was held in Tucson in 2013.Harley mentioned he had tree-ring records from the Florida Keys that went back to 1707 -- and that the tree rings revealed when hurricanes had occurred. The growth of trees is retarded in years with hurricanes. That reduction in growth is reflected in the tree's annual rings.Domínguez-Delmás, a dendroarchaelogist, figures out when Spanish ships were built by retrieving wood from shipwrecks and dating the wood. Trouet wondered whether the tree-ring record of Florida hurricanes could be combined with shipwreck data to create a long-term history of Caribbean hurricanes.The team discovered that a book used by treasure hunters, Robert F. Marx's book "Shipwrecks in the Americas: a complete guide to every major shipwreck in the Western Hemisphere," had a detailed record of Caribbean shipwrecks. The team also used "Shipwrecks of Florida: A comprehensive listing," by Steven D. Singer.The books, combined with ship logs, allowed the researchers to compile a list of Spanish ships known to have been wrecked by storms during the hurricane seasons of 1495-1825. The team found that the hurricane patterns from the shipwreck database closely matched Florida Keys tree-ring chronology of hurricanes from 1707-1825.In addition, the team compared the Florida Keys tree-ring records to the systematic recordings of hurricanes from 1850-2009. Again, the patterns matched.When they overlapped the shipwreck data with the tree-ring data, the researchers discovered a 75 percent reduction in hurricane activity from 1645-1715, a time period known as the Maunder Minimum."We didn't go looking for the Maunder Minimum," Trouet said. "It just popped out of the data."The Maunder Minimum is so named because there was a low in sunspot activity during that time. Because Earth receives less solar radiation during lulls in sunspot activity, the Northern Hemisphere was cooler during the Maunder Minimum than in the time periods before or after.Learning that a lull in Caribbean hurricanes corresponded to a time when Earth received less solar energy will help researchers better understand the influence of large changes in radiation, including that from greenhouse gas emissions, on hurricane activity.Having better predictions about how anthropogenic climate change affects hurricane activity is important because hurricanes are so destructive and have big societal impacts, Trouet said. She anticipates the new findings will help improve future hurricane predictions under a changing climate. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
March 7, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160307113555.htm | New York harbor's oyster beds once protected against severe storm and extreme wave damage | A recent study of past disturbance of the oyster beds in New York Harbor led by geoscientist Jonathan Woodruff and his doctoral student Christine Brandon of the University of Massachusetts Amherst is the first to link Europeans' overharvesting and disturbance of the ancient shellfish beds to loss of natural coastal defenses against floods and storm waves. | Woodruff and first author Brandon, with colleagues at Stevens Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, used a new approach based on sediment reconstructions from coastal ponds and hydrodynamic model simulations to show that the initial degradation of oyster reefs in the harbor following European settlement coincides with "a significant increase in wave-derived overwash deposition" at all of their field sites. Details appear in an early online issue of Woodruff says, "We initially set out to investigate what Hurricane Sandy's resultant sand deposit looked like in coastal ponds on Staten Island, a location in outer New York Harbor that is occasionally exposed to ocean swells. These sites were flooded severely during the event and we were curious how this "Sandy" deposit compared to sediments deposited by earlier flood events. An event layer from Hurricane Sandy was clearly present at all our sites, as well as older storm deposits that dated to historical floods." An event layer is a tell-tale sign in sediment, in the case of Sandy a red layer of denser, coarse-grained sediment associated with storm overwash.He adds, "However, prior to between 1600 and 1800 these storm deposits went away. If it were just one site it would have been one thing, but at every site we saw the same: no storm deposits for thousands of years before European settlement and then after colonization, storm waves start to become more and more effective in transporting sand inland to our field sites. Something the early colonists did seemed to increase storm-induced overwash at the study sites. The million dollar question was what."At first the authors thought the answer might be sea-level rise, variability in storm activity or land clearing, but when reviewed in detail none of these explanations was consistent with observations, Woodruff notes. "We kept reaching dead ends until we considered one of the largest impacts European settlers had on New York Harbor, the decimation of its natural oyster beds."These beds were one of the most notable features of New York Harbor when Europeans arrived, covering as much as 220,000 acres of the Hudson and Raritan Rivers' estuary. Oysters were a staple of early colonial diets, and an important lime source for farm fields and construction mortar, the geoscientist says. Between 1600 and 1800, the New York oyster beds were rapidly over-harvested by hand and from dredges towed by sloops and schooners. The authors hypothesize that the reefs had absorbed a significant fraction of storm-wave energy before they were destroyed.To test this hypothesis, co-author Philip Orton at Stevens used a circulation and wave simulation model to reconstruct past wave heights and storm surge elevations, and to model the effects of oyster beds on wave heights in two historic storms, Sandy in 2012 and a severe 1992 winter storm. Woodruff and colleagues also collected core sediment samples from 5 to 6.5 meters (about 16 to 21 feet) deep, going back about 3,000 years, to analyze storm layers and other features.Simulations for the two storms included a control case without oyster beds, as well as with oyster beds at locations roughly corresponding to those historically documented in New York's outer harbor. The authors conclude from this modeling that "sensitivity to reef height is strong." For example, in the control with no oyster bed present, the 1992 storm model showed as much as a 200 percent increase in wave energy when compared to the oyster reef cases. Thus, they say, "reefs provided significant coastal protection from waves prior to their disturbance between 1600 and 1800."They acknowledge, "As with any sedimentary record, there will always be a certain level of uncertainty related to its interpretation." However, numerical modeling shows that the overharvesting and destruction of oyster reefs "provides a reasonable explanation for the increase in storm-induced overwash observed at our study sites."The study showed that this area of New York Harbor is now experiencing between about 30 percent and 200 percent higher wave energy from extreme storms than in the distant past. "This translates into increased vulnerability of the area to storms: a result most likely shared by other coastal areas that have lost their natural oyster beds," Woodruff and colleagues note. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
January 19, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160119141420.htm | Warmer oceans could produce more powerful superstorms | Hurricane Sandy became the second costliest hurricane to hit the United States when it blew ashore in October 2012, killing 159 people and inflicting $71 billion in damage. Informally known as a "superstorm" after it made landfall, Sandy was so destructive largely because of its unusual size and track. After moving north from the tropical waters where it spawned, Sandy turned out to sea before hooking back west, growing in size and crashing head-on into the East Coast, gaining strength when it merged with an eastbound mid-latitude storm. | A new study led by the University of Maryland's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) suggests that a warmer Atlantic Ocean could substantially boost the destructive power of a future superstorm like Sandy. The researchers used a numerical model to simulate the weather patterns that created Sandy, with one key difference: a much warmer sea surface temperature, as would be expected in a world with twice as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This simulated warmer ocean generated storms that were 50 to 160 percent more destructive than Sandy. The results appear online January 19, 2016 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters."This kind of experiment is not necessarily a realistic simulation, but it is along a similar path that the future climate might expect to evolve," said William Lau, a research scientist at ESSIC and senior scientist emeritus at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Lau added that sea surface temperatures could reach such elevated levels within the next 50 to 100 years.In the model scenarios, the pool of warm water (greater than 82 degrees Fahrenheit) in the tropical Atlantic grew to twice its actual size. The larger warm pool gave the simulated hurricanes more time to grow before they encountered colder water or land.In the five simulations conducted by Lau and his colleagues at NASA Goddard, two hurricanes followed the same track as Sandy, hooking westward and merging with the mid-latitude storm as they hit the coast. Because of their longer exposure to the large warm pool, their winds had 50 to 80 percent more destructive power, and they brought 30 to 50 percent more heavy rain."We expected the storm would definitely get stronger because of much warmer sea surface temperature," Lau said.Each of the other three hurricanes followed a surprising and even more destructive course. In these simulations, the hurricane grew so strong that it followed a different track and didn't collide with the mid-latitude storm. Instead, the hurricane went farther east into the open ocean before turning westward. Next, the hurricane and the mid-latitude storm rotated counterclockwise around their combined center of mass--a phenomenon known as the Fujiwhara effect. As the mid-latitude storm rotated east, the Sandy-like storm gained strength from the Fujiwhara effect and swung westward, making landfall between Maine and Nova Scotia."These events are somewhat rare in occurrence, but they do exist in nature," Lau said. "While they're turning about each other, they interact. One just took the energy from the other."As a result, the three Fujiwhara-enhanced hurricanes' destructive power peaked at 100 to 160 percent higher than Sandy, and brought as much as 180 percent more rain. And while they made landfall farther north, Lau said, their impacts could be farther-reaching and more devastating than Sandy."Because the size of the storm is so large, it could affect the entire Atlantic coast, not just where it makes landfall," he predicted. "The rainfall itself is probably way out in the ocean, but the storm surge would be catastrophic."Lau said the usual approach to simulating a storm in a warmer climate would be to impose a prescribed sea surface temperature, and then adjust the atmospheric conditions such as air temperature, moisture and winds. The model would then be run many times, making adjustments each time in hopes of creating a Sandy-like storm. But this approach is tedious and does not guarantee meaningful results, Lau explained."When confronted with the question whether or not global warming contributed to Sandy, many scientists would just throw their hands up and say, 'We cannot address the question of how hurricanes will behave in a future climate because the myriad factors affecting storm behaviors are too complex and impossible to simulate'," Lau said. "This is the first time it was done by using known atmospheric initial conditions that gave rise to Sandy, and simply changing one important variable--in this case, the ocean temperature."By using this approach, Lau and colleagues created an informative--if only plausible--scenario that could help to understand how storms might behave in a future warmer climate.Lau noted that Sandy was most likely a "perfect storm" brought about by a series of improbable coincidences. As such, it's hard to make any definite conclusions about whether and how global warming contributed to Sandy and other recent destructive storms, he said."However, studies like ours can help provide informative answers to the more tractable question of how a perfect storm like Sandy would behave under warmer ocean temperatures," Lau said. "It's a very important line of investigation for better understanding the future of our planet." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
January 14, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160114163037.htm | NASA sees formation of unusual North Atlantic Hurricane Alex | The low pressure area known as System 90L developed rapidly since Jan. 13 and became Hurricane Alex on Jan. 14. Several satellites and instruments captured data on this out-of-season storm. NASA's RapidScat instrument observed sustained winds shift and intensify in the system and NASA's Aqua satellite saw the storm develop from a low pressure area into a sub-tropical storm. NOAA's GOES-East satellite data was made into an animation that showed the development of the unusual storm. | Twice on Jan. 13 NASA's RapidScat instrument measured the strongest sustained winds in what was then a tropical low pressure area called "System 90L." RapidScat flies aboard the International Space Station. RapidScat's earliest view of System 90L showed strongest sustained winds were near 27 meters per second (mps)/60.4 mph/97.2 kph) and were located northwest of center. Eight hours later at 1200 UTC (7 a.m. EST) strongest sustained winds shifted east of center and increased to near 30 mps (67.1 mph/108 kph), making them tropical-storm force.Later in the day at 2100 UTC (4 p.m. EST) satellite images indicated that the low pressure system developed into a subtropical storm and was named Alex. At the time, Alex was located near 27.1 degrees north latitude and 30.8 degrees west longitude, about 782 miles (1,260 km) south-southwest of the Azores.By 1500 UTC (10 a.m. EST) on January 14, hurricane force winds extended outward up to 25 miles (35 km) from the center and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 150 miles (240 km).An animation of GOES-East satellite visible and infrared imagery from Jan. 10 to 14 showed the development of Hurricane Alex in the Central Atlantic Ocean. The animation was created at the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The animation showed the sub-tropical low pressure area consolidate quickly on Jan. 13 and reach hurricane status on Jan. 14, 2016.The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Hurricane Alex on Jan. 14 at 15:30 UTC (10:30 a.m. EST) in the central Atlantic Ocean. The image revealed an eye and showed bands of thunderstorms spiraling into the low level center of circulation.According to the National Hurricane Center, Alex is the first hurricane to form in the month of January since 1938. Alex is also the first North Atlantic hurricane thriving in January since Alice of 1955, which formed on Dec. 30, 1954. Alice developed on December 30, 1954 from a trough of low pressure in the central Atlantic Ocean in an area of unusually favorable conditions.The Azores Meteorological Service has issued a Hurricane Warning for the islands of Faial, Pico, Sao Jorge, Graciosa, and Terceira in the central Azores, and a Tropical Storm Warning for the islands of Sao Miguel and Santa Maria in the eastern Azores. A Hurricane Warning is in effect for Faial, Pico, Sao Jorge, Graciosa, and Terceira in the central Azores and a Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for Sao Miguel and Santa Maria in the eastern Azores.At 10 a.m. EST (1500 UTC), the National Hurricane Center said that the center of Hurricane Alex was located near latitude 31.5 North, longitude 28.4 West. Alex was moving toward the north-northeast near 20 mph (31 kph) and a turn toward the north with an increase in forward speed is expected over the next day or two. On the forecast track, the center of Alex will move near or over portions of the Azores Friday morning, Jan. 15.Maximum sustained winds are near 85 mph (140 kph) with higher gusts. Little change in strength is forecast through Friday. The estimated minimum central pressure is 981 millibars.NHC's Forecaster Pasch said "Remarkably, Alex has undergone the transformation into a hurricane. A distinct eye is present, embedded within a fairly symmetric mass of deep convection. It is very unusual to have a hurricane over waters that are near 20 degrees Celsius, but the upper-tropospheric temperatures are estimated to be around -60 degrees Celsius, which is significantly colder than the tropical mean. The resulting instability is likely the main factor contributing to the tropical transition and intensification of Alex."Alex is expected to maintain hurricane status on Friday, Jan. 15 and transition into an extra-tropical storm by Jan. 16 as it continues to move north toward Greenland.For updates on Alex, visit NOAA's NHC website: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
January 12, 2016 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160112125421.htm | NASA's Terra satellite spots record-breaking Hurricane Pali | Shortly after NASA's Terra satellite passed over Tropical Storm Pali it strengthened into a record-breaking hurricane. | On Jan. 11 at 22:30 UTC (5:30 p.m. EST) the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of strengthening Tropical Storm Pali in the Central Pacific Ocean. On Jan. 11 at 10 p.m. EST (5 p.m. HST/Jan 12 at 0300 UTC) Pali became the earliest hurricane on record in the central Pacific basin far to the southwest of Hawaii. In the MODIS image, Pali's eye was visible surrounded by a strong circle of thunderstorms and a thick band of thunderstorms spiraled into the low level center from the western quadrant.NOAA's Central Pacific Hurricane Center forecaster Wroe noted "after exhibiting a rather well defined eye through the evening...a recent burst of deep convection around the center of Hurricane Pali has caused the eye to become cloud filled...likely due to southwesterly vertical wind shear of around 15 knots."On Jan. 12 at 10 a.m. EST (5 a.m. HST/1500 UTC) the center of Hurricane Pali was located near latitude 6.8 north and longitude 171.4 west. That's about 695 miles (1,120 km) south of Johnston Island and 1,345 miles (2,170 km) southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. Maximum sustained winds are near 90 mph (150 kph). Slow weakening is expected through Thursday morning, Jan. 14. The estimated minimum central pressure is 979 millibars. Pali was moving toward the south near 7 mph and is expected to gradually turn to the southwest.CPHC said that although Pali will remain over warm sea surface temperatures of 28 to 29 Celsius (82.4 to 84.2 Fahrenheit) along the forecast track...ships indicates a modest Increase in wind shear that could produce some weakening during the next couple of days as it moves toward the equator. For updated forecasts, visit: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,016 |
December 23, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151223141447.htm | Philippine coastal zone research reveals tropical cyclone disruption of nutrient cycling | Living on beachfront property on a tropical island is an idyllic life goal for many people. Those people may be envious of a number of native Philippine plant species that restrict their population distribution to coastal zones. But that idyllic life comes with a price, as revealed in an article that appears in issue 2 of the 2015 volume of the | "Island nations in the western Pacific region are subjected to more tropical cyclones than anywhere else worldwide," said Thomas Marler, ecologist with the University of Guam. "And the greatest destructive forces of tropical cyclones occurs on coastal zone habitats."Working out of the Western Pacific Tropical Research Center, Marler teamed up with Ulysses Ferreras, a biologist with the Philippine Native Plants Conservation Society. The research partnership attempted to more fully understand the destructive forces of the typhoon by looking at the influence on chemical cycling among the interacting biological and geological systems. Their research focused on several islands in the eastern Visayan region of the Philippines where the typhoon first made landfall on 8 November 2013."We had conducted a lot of field work in these habitats during the years prior to the tropical cyclone," said Marler, "so we were able to return to those same habitats in attempts to understand the damage." The study included several habitats that contained different soil traits but supported a common plant species, The publication illuminates several ways in which a tropical cyclone disrupts nutrient flow through the ecosystem. For example, defoliation of green leaves may be one of the most common responses of forests to tropical cyclone damage. Because these leaves were unable to proceed through the normal aging process before being dislodged from the trees, nutritional status of the plants temporarily decreases and forest floor nutritional deposits temporarily increase. Additionally, many plant leaves were partially desiccated by cyclone-force winds, but not fully killed. In response, nutrients were locked up in the damaged portions of these leaves forcing them to stay suspended in tree canopies for extended periods of time instead of falling with customary litterfall to enter the soil nutrient cycling process.Tropical cyclones are called typhoons in the western Pacific and hurricanes in the Atlantic basin. They are an example of what ecologists consider infrequent, large-scale disturbances. The ecosystem responses to the damage may be altered for many years following the disturbance event that may last only a few hours. This case study provides a relevant example of these phenomena from the heavily impacted but seldom studied Philippine islands. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
December 21, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151221193414.htm | Normal weather drives salt marsh erosion | For salt marshes, hurricanes are just another day at the beach. | These coastal wetlands are in retreat in many locations around the globe--raising deep concerns about damage to the wildlife that the marshes nourish and the loss of their ability to protect against violent storms. The biggest cause of their erosion is waves driven by moderate storms, not occasional major events such as Hurricane Sandy, researchers from Boston University and the United States Geological Survey now have shown."Waves are very powerful because they attack the marsh in its weakest part," says Nicoletta Leonardi, a Ph.D. candidate at BU's Department of Earth & Environment and lead author on a paper published in the journal Analyzing eight salt marsh locations in Australia, Italy and the United States, "we found that the behavior of salt marshes is very predictable," says Leonardi, with a constant relationship between wave energy and the speed of marsh erosion.In fact, the work shows that hurricanes and other violent storms contribute less than 1 percent of salt marsh deterioration in those marshes, says Sergio Fagherazzi, BU Earth & Environment associate professor and co-author on the paper.Along the New England coast, for example, the moderate northeast storms that may hit every few months strip away far more from the marshes than the hurricanes that may sweep through a few times a decade. "Salt marshes survive for thousands of years, which means they know how to cope against hurricane waves," he says.In a major storm, "beaches or dunes on a beach just collapse all at once," Fagherazzi adds. "Marshes don't, which is a major advantage if you are serious about using them for hazard mitigation and coast protection.""While hurricanes are catastrophic events, the salt marsh doesn't respond catastrophically," says Neil Kamal Ganju, a co-author and research oceanographer with USGS in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In addition to the infrequency of hurricanes, that may be because a hurricane's surge brings up water level so high over a marsh that waves have relatively little effect, he suggests.Improved knowledge about salt marsh erosion brings an important new tool to those responsible for management and restoration of wetlands. "You can take the geography of a salt marsh and the estuary around it, and if you understand the wind climate and the wave climate, using historical data, you now can predict the marsh erosion," says Ganju.Globally, salt marshes are being lost to waves, changes in land use, higher sea levels, loss of sediment from upstream dams and other factors. This puts at risk "a lot of ecosystem services that we need to preserve," Leonardi emphasizes. Many initiatives around the world now seek to protect and rebuild salt marshes. Evidence also suggests that, at least in some coastal environments, marshes can adapt to rising sea levels.In the United States, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and many cities want to manage salt marshes as "living shorelines" that act as buffers between coastal communities and the ocean, Fagherazzi says. Such efforts kicked off in New Jersey and New York after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.The effect of waves on salt marsh erosion, part of a USGS project to examine the response of estuaries to Hurricane Sandy, is being integrated into a USGS numerical model called COAWST (Coupled-Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment Transport). COAWST combines models of ocean, atmosphere, waves and sediment transport for analysis of coastal change.Better understanding of marsh erosion also may help in modeling carbon storage as it relates to climate change, the scientists say. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
November 16, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151116084022.htm | Study ranks six American cities on preparation for climate change | A new study assesses the factors that affect climate change adaptation and ranks six American cities, finding that Portland, Boston and Los Angeles are all in the advanced to middle stages of planning for extreme weather events linked to climate change while Raleigh and Tucson are in the early to middle stages. Tampa, a city that is at the highest risk for hurricanes in the United States, was at the bottom of the list with little or no planning for the shifting risks due to climate change, according to researchers at Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) at the George Washington University. | This study, which is a first of a kind, found that the political culture of a given city could affect how well city officials moved to prepare for extreme weather."Tampa is vulnerable to climate change and associated extreme weather," says lead author Sabrina McCormick, PhD, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at Milken Institute SPH. "Despite this risk, Florida's political representatives remain largely unconcerned about climate change." Without the political will or public education, city decision-makers interviewed said that Tampa was one of the least prepared cities in the nation. McCormick notes that more than 125,000 residents of the Tampa area live below the flood line and would face great danger during the next big hurricane that hits the Tampa coastline.The study is the first to look at societal factors, such as the political environment, and how they affect a city's ability to act on climate change. "This research is critical to moving cities forward in addressing climate impacts so that economic risk can be reduced and human health can be protected," McCormick and her co-author report. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and others, climate change will lead to a number of human health threats that range from premature death or injuries caused by wildfires or hurricanes to post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues triggered by natural disasters.McCormick interviewed sixty-five local decision makers in each of the six cities, finding there are three factors that play a role in how well city planners plan for or prepare for climate change. The study found swing factors, such as the risk of extreme weather, could motivate city officials or hamper them--often the outcome depended on the political culture in a given city.For example, Tampa has the highest risk for hurricanes in the United States, yet has a public and political climate that has impeded action on climate change. In contrast, Los Angeles faces a high risk of wildfires/heat waves due to rising temperatures. Unlike Tampa, politicians in Los Angeles acknowledge the high risk and have used it to take action. This study found that Los Angeles was in the middle of extensive planning for such disasters and had a well-developed emergency management system as a result.Second, scientific uncertainty and political opposition could affect the ability of a city to plan and prepare for climate change. For example, Portland, a city with many liberal politicians and public concern about climate change, had the most advanced plans of all of the cities in the study. Tucson, Tampa and Raleigh, cities that had more Conservative Democratics or Republicans, had many politicians who dismissed climate change and rarely made it part of their political platform.Finally, a city's ability to move aggressively on climate change also depends on a well-informed public and political engagement, the study found. "For example, in Los Angeles and Portland, decision makers generally felt that a majority of the citizens accepted the existence of climate change, often pressuring politicians and decision makers to address it," McCormick says. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
November 13, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151113105628.htm | Houston-Galveston region could be better protected from impact of hurricanes and severe storms | New structural and nonstructural solutions could better protect the Houston-Galveston region from the impact of hurricanes and severe storms, according to a research paper by energy, engineering and environmental law experts at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. | The paper, "Legal Issues in Hurricane Damage Risk Abatement," examines various alternatives for mitigating floods and storm damage and analyzes the federal regulations that could apply in seeking funding for the proposals. It was co-authored by Jim Blackburn, a professor in the practice of environmental law at Rice and Baker Institute Rice Faculty Scholar; Regina Buono, the Baker Botts Fellow in Energy and Environmental Regulatory Affairs at the institute's Center for Energy Studies; and Larry Dunbar, project manager for Rice's Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center (SSPEED).Past discussions of hurricane-protection options for the Houston-Galveston region have focused on constructing a floodgate at the mouth of either Galveston Bay or the Houston Ship Channel. In the latest analysis of options that federal, state and local officials might consider, SSPEED experts this summer issued a report offering a third alternative: a mid-bay gate halfway between the previously discussed sites."It is impossible to discuss mitigating these hurricane-surge damage issues without taking federal environmental law and policy into account, particularly if federal money is being relied upon, a point that seems to be missed by many local advocates," said Blackburn, who is co-director of SSPEED. "At least two alternatives exist that offer substantial protection of industry and residences in the bay's high-risk zone, but the law and policies relate to each in different ways. The mid-bay alternative might be able to be funded with local and/or state monies, whereas the lower-bay alternative almost certainly will require federal money, thereby more directly invoking federal environmental laws and funding policies."The authors said the vulnerability of the U.S. coastline to severe storms is clear in wake of hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Ike and Wilma, which collectively amounted to more than $200 billion in economic loss, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Houston-Galveston region alone experienced more than $25 billion in economic loss from Hurricane Ike in 2008, despite the fact that the greatest impact missed the region and instead hit east of Galveston Bay, according to SSPEED.In the aftermath of Ike, SSPEED has been studying hurricane-surge damage reduction strategies under a grant from the Houston Endowment. The goal of this work is to develop and evaluate structural and nonstructural alternatives to create a plan capable of significantly reducing hurricane-surge damages in the region.Blackburn said that more generally, the goal of this paper is to discuss evolving federal flood-damage reduction policy and the increased importance and integration of ecological service features into project design. "The paper presents the Texas Coastal Exchange, a nonstructural, ecological services-based flood-damage mitigation concept that has great potential not only for Galveston Bay but across the U.S.," he said. "This ecological services orientation of the federal government has only recently emerged under the Obama administration and is a major refocusing of flood-damage reduction policy at the federal level. The creation of a market-based ecological services transaction system is an excellent way to integrate emerging federal policy creatively with market forces to achieve long-term surge protection as well as a response to sea-level rise, which is not emphasized in the paper."The research paper can be found at: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
November 7, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151107202528.htm | Human-caused climate change increased the severity of many extreme events in 2014 | Human activities, such as greenhouse gas emissions and land use, influenced specific extreme weather and climate events in 2014, including tropical cyclones in the central Pacific, heavy rainfall in Europe, drought in East Africa, and stifling heat waves in Australia, Asia, and South America, according to a new report released today. The report, "Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective" published by the | "For each of the past four years, this report has demonstrated that individual events, like temperature extremes, have often been shown to be linked to additional atmospheric greenhouse gases caused by human activities, while other extremes, such as those that are precipitation related, are less likely to be convincingly linked to human activities," said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. "As the science of event attribution continues to advance, so too will our ability to detect and distinguish the effects of long-term climate change and natural variability on individual extreme events. Until this is fully realized, communities would be well-served to look beyond the range of past extreme events to guide future resiliency efforts."In this year's report, 32 groups of scientists from around the world investigate 28 individual extreme events in 2014 and break out various factors that led to the extreme events, including the degree to which natural variability and human-induced climate change played a role. When human influence for an event cannot be conclusively identified with the scientific tools available today, this means that if there is a human contribution, it cannot be distinguished from natural climate variability.The report this year added analysis on new types of events including wildfires and Antarctic sea ice extent, and in one case looked at how land use patterns may influence the impacts and severity from precipitation.Key findings for each of the assessed events include:"Understanding our influence on specific extreme weather events is ground-breaking science that will help us adapt to climate change," said Stephanie C. Herring, Ph.D., lead editor for the report at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. "As the field of climate attribution science grows, resource managers, the insurance industry, and many others can use the information more effectively for improved decision making and to help communities better prepare for future extreme events."Report: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
October 21, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151021170825.htm | Ocean heat content reveals secrets of fish migration behaviors | Researchers at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science developed a new method to estimate fish movements using ocean heat content images, a dataset commonly used in hurricane intensity forecasting. With Atlantic tarpon as the messenger, this is the first study to quantitatively show that large migratory fishes, such as yellowfin and bluefin tunas, blue and white marlin, and sailfish have affinities for ocean fronts and eddies. | "Ocean heat content data revealed detailed movements of fishes that were not readily apparent using surface temperature data," said Jerald S. Ault, UM Rosenstiel School professor of marine biology and ecology. "This offers a powerful new approach to study how fish interact with dynamic water features relatively common in the ocean."Ocean heat content (OHC) relative to the 26°C isotherm, a measure of heat stored in the upper surface layers of the ocean, has been used for more than four decades by scientists to help predict hurricane intensity. Over the past two decades, OHC has been monitored daily using satellite fields and in-situ data that provide basin-scale variability for both weather and climate studies. In addition to providing the OHC for forecasting, these previous studies showed OHC images reveal dynamic ocean features, such as fronts and eddies, in the ocean better than just using standard techniques (e.g., sea surface temperature), especially during the summer months.The researchers compared data on fish movements obtained from pop-up satellite tags affixed to the highly migratory fish alongside maps of the heat stored in the upper ocean. "Using an advanced optimization algorithm and OHC maps, we developed a method to greatly improve geolocation accuracy and refine fish movement tracks derived from satellite tags," said Jiangang Luo, lead author and UM scientist at the Tarpon and Bonefish Research Center. The analysis revealed that fish commonly swim along the boundaries of water features in the ocean, such as fronts, like the Florida and Loop Current and their complex eddy fields."Using the OHC approach in a new way offers an unprecedented view of how these animals move with currents and eddies in the ocean," said Nick Shay, UM Rosenstiel School professor of ocean sciences. "Our study provides a more detailed picture of the ocean ecosystem as an entity."In one 109-day analysis, the researchers documented a yellowfin tuna move along a weak front off the Mississippi River before reaching an eddy centered in the Gulf of Mexico. In separate analysis, a yellowfin tuna swam around the periphery of the same eddy many times over a 20-day period, rarely passing over it.Eddies are swirling masses of water that have been shed from strong ocean current fronts, and pump nutrient-rich water to the surface. Fronts are a type of current created at a boundary between two distinct water masses with differing physical properties, such as different temperatures, salinities. In the Gulf of Mexico, warm eddies are often shed from the Loop Current in the summer months causing a rapid intensification of hurricanes (e.g., Katrina) as they pass over it."Our new method shows that hurricanes and highly migratory fish share at least one common oceanographic interest -- warm swirling ocean eddies," said Ault. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
October 15, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151015144804.htm | New study questions long-held theories of climate variability in the North Atlantic | A University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric-led study challenges the prevailing wisdom by identifying the atmosphere as the driver of a decades-long climate variation known as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). The findings offer new insight on the causes and predictability of natural climate variations, which are known to cause wide-ranging global weather impacts, including increased rainfall, drought, and greater hurricane frequency in many parts of the Atlantic basin. | For decades, research on climate variations in the Atlantic has focused almost exclusively on the role of ocean circulation as the main driver, specifically the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which carries warm water north in the upper layers of the ocean and cold water south in lower layers like a large conveyor belt."The idea of the ocean as the driver has been a powerful one." said UM Rosenstiel School Professor Amy Clement, the lead author on the study. We used computer models in a new way to test this idea, and find that in fact there is a lot that can be explained without the ocean circulation."While the overall rise in average temperature of the Atlantic is caused by greenhouse gases, this study examines the fluctuations occurring within this human-related trend. Identifying the main driver of the AMO is critical to help predict the overall warming of the North Atlantic Ocean in coming decades from both natural and human-made climate change. Recent research suggests that an AMO warm phase has been in effect since the mid-1990s, which has caused changes in rainfall in the southeastern US, and resulted in twice as many tropical storms becoming hurricanes than during cool phases.Using multiple climate models from around the world, Clement's research team removed the ocean circulation from the analysis to reveal that variations in the Atlantic climate were generally the same. The AMO results in a horseshoe-shaped pattern of ocean surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean that have been naturally occurring for the last 1000 years on timescales of 60-80 years. This new analysis shows that the pattern of the AMO can be accounted for by atmospheric circulation alone, without any role for the ocean circulation."These results force us to rethink our ability to predict decade-scale temperature fluctuations in the Atlantic and their associated impacts on land. It may be that many of the changes have limited predictability, which means that we should be prepared for a range of climate outcomes associated with global warming," said Clement.The work was support by grants from the Department of Energy and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
September 28, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150928155855.htm | Flood risk on rise for New York City, New Jersey coast, study finds | Flood risk for New York City and the New Jersey coast has increased significantly during the last 1,000 years due to hurricanes and accompanying storm surges, according to a study by Penn State University, Rutgers University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University and Tufts University. | For the first time, climate researchers compared both sea-level rise rates and storm surge heights in prehistoric and modern eras and found that the combined increases of each have raised the likelihood of a devastating 500-year flood occurring as often as every 25 years."A storm that occurred once in seven generations is now occurring twice in a generation," said Benjamin Horton, a Rutgers marine and coastal sciences professor. Horton also is the principal investigator on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation grants funding the research.The study, "Increased Threat of Tropical Cyclones and Coastal Flooding During the Anthropogenic Era," was published in PNAS (Flooding heights increased 1.2 meters from the prehistoric era to the modern era, researchers found. "This is mainly due to the rising sea level. Sea levels have been rising in the modern era because of human activity," Horton said. "Sea-level rise between hurricanes raises the 'baseline' water level and makes flooding more likely."Flood heights increased 1.2 meters from the prehistoric era to the modern era, mainly due to rising sea level, researchers found.In the new study, researchers provided a continuous sea-level reconstruction since A.D 850. They showed that since the late 19th century sea level has risen at its steepest rate for more than 1,000 years. What does that mean for residents along the New York/New Jersey coast? "An extra 100,000 people flooded in the region during Hurricane Sandy who would not have flooded if sea level had not been rising," Horton said of the 2012 storm.Climate scientists have established that two types of storms cause the most damage -- big, slow-moving storms and smaller but higher-intensity storms -- and this study found that both have significantly increased in the modern era. "What we do know is that as sea level rise accelerates into the future, we are going to have more frequent flooding," Horton said.To reconstruct sea level, the research team used microfossils called foraminifera preserved in sediment cores from coastal salt marshes in New Jersey. The age of these cores was estimated using radiocarbon dating and several other complementary techniques. "Every inch deeper in a core takes you further back in time," Horton explained. "We can stretch this technique back hundreds of years and thousands of years."Researchers have established that the drivers of climate changes in the prehistoric era were natural causes, while in the later period human actions have driven increases in sea-level heights and other climate measures that affect storm activity.The paper found that flood heights have increased during the modern era not only because of relative sea-level rise but also due to changing hurricane characteristics, leading to an increased risk of coastal inundation. "The increasing flood risk projected for the coming decades presents a hazard to New York City's and New Jersey's intense concentrations of population, economic production, and static infrastructure, and indicates the necessity for risk management solutions," Horton said.As sea levels continue to rise at an accelerated pace, the risk of coastal flooding will rise as well. That's why the next phase of this research, led by doctoral candidate Andra Reed at Penn State University, will use the data gathered to make models to predict future sea levels and hurricane activity and when major storms like Hurricane Sandy will strike."We need to do this so we can provide better information to residents of New York and New Jersey and to policymakers, insurance industries and the states to prepare for how often an event as severe as Hurricane Sandy will occur," Horton said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
August 27, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150827121937.htm | About 10 percent of mothers experienced depression two years after Hurricane Katrina | About 10 percent of mothers experienced chronic, persistent depressive symptoms two years after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 people, displacing hundreds of thousands and causing widespread damage estimated at more than $100 billion, according to a Georgia State University study. | While most people don't develop persistent depression after a major disaster like that, a small but significant number will, according to a study led by Dr. Betty S. Lai, assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the School of Public Health at Georgia State.The study, titled "Hurricane Katrina: Maternal Depression Trajectories and Child Outcomes," was published recently in "Overall, our findings indicate that the majority of mothers did not report elevated depressive symptom trajectories postdisaster," the report stated. However, 10 percent of the mothers reported "chronic, persistent depressive symptoms more than two years postdisaster."Because maternal depression has been linked to negative parenting practices and increased behavioral problems in children, "understanding maternal depression following a disaster is necessary for developing interventions for improving maternal adjustment," the report said.The study focused specifically on low-income women, the majority of whom are single parents. In their report, the researchers noted that mothers, in general, may report higher levels of depression after large-scale disasters because they often place the needs of their children above their own. Impoverished mothers face an even greater risk of developing depression in those circumstances because they may have scant support resources.The study also examined how maternal depression affected children, focusing on symptoms such as posttraumatic stress, depression and anxiety. Surprisingly, maternal depression trajectories were not associated with differences in children's distress symptoms," the report stated.Researchers noted that studies examining fathers' distress symptoms are needed to better understand the family dynamic after disasters.The co-authors of the study were Dr. Shannon Self-Brown, professor of health promotion and behavior at the Georgia State School of Public Health, as well as researchers Ashwini Tiwari and Brooke A. Beaulieu, both of the School of Public Health, and Louisiana State University psychology professor Mary Lou Kelley. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
August 24, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150824212258.htm | Flood damage after Hurricane Katrina could have been prevented, experts say | A decade after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, experts say the flooding that caused over 1,800 deaths and billions of dollars in property damage could have been prevented had the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers retained an external review board to double-check its flood-wall designs. | Dr. J. David Rogers, Karl F. Hasselmann Missouri Chair in Geological Engineering at Missouri S&T, was lead researcher on a paper published this spring in Water Policy law journal titled "Interaction between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Orleans Levee Board preceding the drainage canal wall failures and catastrophic flooding of New Orleans in 2005."The journal article focuses on the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and its lack of external peer reviews that allowed for faulty flood walls to be installed in the city. It pinpoints the key factors that led to the walls' failure and the actions taken years before the disaster that allowed the engineering oversights to occur."As more information has emerged from the time of the disaster and its prior decision-making processes, new details allow us to have a better idea of the situation and what led to the various levee failures," says Rogers. "This article is meant to put the record straight about the conclusions people drew from the disaster, many of which were based on incorrect information."Rogers and his co-authors contend that the main fault in the failure of the flood walls along the city's principal drainage canals was the misinterpretation of a full-scale load test carried out by the Corps in the Atachafalaya Basin a few years prior to Katrina. After these so-called E-99 tests, it was determined that flood walls in the city should be installed at a depth of 17 feet, instead of the initially estimated depths of 31 to 46 feet. This decision was made partially with the city's budget in mind, and also through a mistaken interpretation of the test results, in part because a heavy cloth tarp covered the gap that formed between the sheet-pile supports and the ground during the test. The tarp was there as a safety measure and its inadvertent impacts were not accounted for during the tests."After Katrina, there was a lot of finger pointing going on," says Rogers. "The Corps, the Orleans Levee Board and various political factions all had a different story to tell. Reviews of the minutes of actual board meetings were crucial in unraveling what people were thinking at the time, and how their principal focus was on other aspects of the flood protection system, of which the flood walls were just one untried piece."The journal article states that critics forget that the Corps had built thousands of miles of levees along rivers throughout the nation that functioned adequately. The flooding that killed 1,836 people in New Orleans and caused billions of dollars in property damage might have been prevented if the Corps had retained an external review board to double-check its designs of the new flood walls, built in the 1990s and early 2000s, says Rogers.Legal responsibility for annual upkeep and inspection of the flood protection system rested with the Corps. The article's authors hope to set the record straight with respect to the critical role played by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
August 20, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150820090722.htm | World should heed lessons from Hurricane Katrina, economist says | A decade after Hurricane Katrina hammered America's Gulf Coast, measures are being taken there to protect against similar devastation from natural disasters -- as well as against long-term, gradual impacts resulting from climate change. | But other coastal regions across the world remain vulnerable to damaging storms, and providing similar protection for the tens of millions of people living in those areas will require international action, says University of Wyoming economist Edward Barbier.In a featured commentary, titled, "Hurricane Katrina's lessons for the world," and published in the journal "For the parts of the world that have extremely vulnerable populations, I think there are lessons that can be learned from the planning strategy that took place in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina," says Barbier, the John S. Bugas Professor of Economics and Finance in the UW College of Business.After Katrina caused about $110 billion in damage, killed more than 1,800 people and displaced 1.2 million others, Louisiana's Coastal Protection Restoration Authority was formed to coordinate local, state and federal efforts to develop a more sustainable coast. Barbier was a member of the science and engineering board that oversaw the scientific analysis for the resulting 2012 Coastal Master Plan.The plan guides Gulf Coast protection and restoration projects over the next 50 years, with a total budget of $50 billion. Those projects include creation of new marshlands and building levees."What the 2012 Louisiana Coastal Master Plan represents is a new way of thinking about long-term coastal management to make coastlines more resilient to short-term natural hazards such as hurricanes and storm surges, and also to protect and adapt to long-term climate change," Barbier says.Similar strategies are urgently needed for other parts of the world, he says, noting that coastal areas "are the front lines of climate change." The gradual impacts of sea-level rise, saline intrusion and erosion resulting from a warming climate -- added to the potential for extreme damage caused by accompanying increases in storm-caused flooding and surges -- should make international action a priority.Barbier notes that around 38 percent of the global population -- 2.5 billion people -- lives within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the coast, and more than three-quarters of them are in developing countries. The most vulnerable are the poor, rural populations in developing countries who live in low-elevation coastal zones less than 10 meters above sea level.Almost all of the world's 60 million poor people living in those low-elevation zones reside in 15 countries: India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iraq, Mozambique, Senegal, Brazil, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand."These 15 nations should be the priority for a long-term global planning strategy to protect coasts and populations that are vulnerable to damaging storms," Barbier wrote.He notes that many of these people depend on agriculture and fishing, industries that are particularly at risk for disruption by storms and climate change. Natural barriers, such as mangroves, provide protection against storms and other coastal hazards, but those barriers are being eroded.Barbier advocates for polices and investments to drive economic diversification away from fishing and agriculture and toward manufacturing and services in these regions. In addition, restoration of coastal features including salt marshes, coral reefs, mangroves and beaches -- along with construction of seawalls, dikes and other structures -- is necessary to protect vulnerable populations.In some cases, people most at risk of harm from storms and gradual sea-level rises "may need to be encouraged to migrate to non-coastal areas," he wrote.Such efforts to develop long-term coastal planning strategies should be financed through international climate-change adaptation funds, Barbier says. They could be done in conjunction with national and local governments in coastal zones on a cost-sharing basis.Various United Nations programs, such as the United Nation's Green Climate Fund, and the World Bank are appropriate sources of funding to help developing countries in their efforts to enhance and protect coasts and populations vulnerable to damaging storms, he says.Widely published in natural resource and development economics as well as the interface between economics and ecology, Barbier has served as a consultant and policy analyst for a variety of national, international and non-governmental agencies, including many United Nations organizations and the World Bank. He has written more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, written or edited 22 books, and published in popular journals. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
August 18, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150818131803.htm | Amazon fire risk linked to devastating hurricanes | Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and NASA have uncovered a remarkably strong link between high wildfire risk in the Amazon basin and the devastating hurricanes that ravage North Atlantic shorelines. The climate scientists' findings appear in the journal | "Hurricane Katrina is indeed part of this story," said James Randerson, Chancellor's Professor of Earth system science at UCI and senior author on the paper. "The ocean conditions that led to a severe hurricane season in 2005 also reduced atmospheric moisture flow to South America, contributing to a once-in-a-century dry spell in the Amazon. The timing of these events is perfectly consistent with our research findings."Lead author Yang Chen discovered that in addition to the well-understood east-west influence of El Niño on the Amazon, there's also a north-south control on fire activity that's set by the state of the tropical North Atlantic. Warm ocean waters help hurricanes develop and gather strength and speed on their way to North American shores. They also tend to pull a large belt of tropical rainfall -- known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone -- to the north, Chen said, drawing moisture away from the southern Amazon and leading to heightened fire risk over time."North Atlantic hurricanes and Amazon fires are related to one another through shared linkages to ocean-atmosphere interactions in the tropical Atlantic Ocean," he said.The mechanics of the ocean-fire link in the Amazon are fairly straightforward. When the North Atlantic sea surface temperatures are warmer than normal, less rain falls in the southern Amazon. As a consequence, groundwater is not fully recharged by the end of the rainy season. Coming into the next dry spell, when there's less water stored away in the soil, plants can't evaporate and transpire as much water out through their stems and leaves. As a result, the atmosphere gets drier and drier, creating conditions in which fires can spread rapidly. Ground-clearing fires set by farmers for agricultural purposes can easily jump from fields to dense forests under these conditions."Understory fires in Amazon forests are extremely damaging, since most rainforest trees are not adapted to fire," noted co-author Douglas Morton of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The synchronization of forest damages from fires in South America and tropical storms in North America highlights how important it is to consider the Earth as a system."The team pored over years of historical storm and sea surface temperature data from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and fire data gathered by NASA satellites. The results showed a striking pattern, a progression over the course of several months from warm waters in the tropical North Atlantic to a dry and fire-prone southern Amazon and more destructive hurricane landfalls in North and Central America.According to Randerson, the importance of this study is that it may help meteorologists develop better seasonal outlooks for drought and fire risk in the Amazon, leveraging investments by NOAA and other agencies in understanding hurricanes. The research findings also give policymakers throughout the hemisphere a basis for decisions about coastal protections in hurricane-prone areas and fire management in drought-affected areas."The fires we see in the U.S. West are generally lightning-ignited, whereas they're mostly human-ignited in the Amazon, but climate change can have really large effects on the fire situation in both regions," Randerson said. "Keeping fire out of the Amazon basin is critical from a carbon-cycle perspective. There's a huge amount of carbon stored in tropical forests; we really want to keep the forests intact."Randerson and Chen credit NASA and NOAA for providing free public access to real-time data from their satellites and other sensors and the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science for research support."Drought in the Amazon and hurricanes in the North Atlantic are such costly and potentially catastrophic disturbances [that] we really rely on NASA and NOAA for help in making accurate forecasts and long-range predictions," Randerson said. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
July 31, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150731105244.htm | New insights on hurricane intensity, pollution transport | As tropical storm Isaac was gaining momentum toward the Mississippi River in August 2012, University of Miami (UM) researchers were dropping instruments from the sky above to study the ocean conditions beneath the storm. The newly published study showed how a downwelling of warm waters deepened the storm's fuel tank for a rapid intensification toward hurricane status. The results also revealed how hurricane-generated currents and ocean eddies can transport oil and other pollutants to coastal regions. | Tropical storms obtain their energy from the ocean waters below. As a storm moves across the Gulf of Mexico, it may interact with an upwelling of cooler waters from the deeper ocean or, in the case of Isaac, a downwelling inside rings of warm water that separated from a warm-water current, called the Loop Current, that moves through the Gulf of Mexico to join with the Gulf Stream along the U.S. East Coast. As the storm moves forward, ocean temperatures are fueling the storm's intensity.UM Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science researchers, in collaboration with NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, deployed a total of 376 airborne sensors during six NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft flights conducted before, during, and after the passage of Isaac over the eastern Gulf of Mexico. The researchers observed a predominant downwelling of water inside these warm-water rings, or eddies, from the Loop Current, which caused its intensification from a tropical storm to a category 1 hurricane just prior to landfall."These results underscore the need for forecast models to include upwelling-downwelling responses to improve intensity forecasting and current transport," said Benjamin Jaimes, an assistant scientist at the UM Rosenstiel School."Isaac moved over the region of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill where we observed both upwelling and downwelling processes that can re-suspend hydrocarbons lying on the seafloor," said Nick Shay, professor of ocean sciences at the UM Rosenstiel School. "This may have resulted in tar balls being deposited on beaches by hurricane-generated currents."Tropical storm Isaac gradually intensified in the Gulf of Mexico to reach category 1 hurricane status as an 80 mph (130 km/h) storm, making landfall along the coast of Louisiana. The storm was estimated to have caused $2.39 billion in damage along its track. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
July 29, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150729113641.htm | Ongoing recovery efforts take toll on hurricane survivors | Superstorm Sandy continues to affect the lives of tens of thousands of New Jersey residents, in the form of unfinished repairs, disputed claims, and recurrent mold. These after-effects still linger for Sandy-impacted residents, and are associated with increased odds of residents experiencing mental health distress, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and depression. | According to the Sandy Child and Family Health Study, a major representative population study of 1 million New Jersey residents living in Sandy's path, over 100,000 New Jersey residents experienced significant structural damage to their primary homes from Superstorm Sandy. Based on findings released from this study, which was conducted by Rutgers University and New York University (NYU), in collaboration with Columbia University and Colorado State University, among those New Jersey residents whose homes suffered such damage, 27% are experiencing moderate or severe mental health distress and 14% report the signs and symptoms of PTSD even two and a half years after the storm."Recovery, or stalled recovery, is not as dramatic as the storm and the initial response," noted Dr. David Abramson, the study's principal investigator. "But it is what exacts the greatest toll both financially and psychologically. Sandy may have occurred nearly three years ago, but it has had an enduring impact on those individuals and communities exposed to it," he said.Among the study's objectives were to help the state identify the health and well-being of residents exposed to the storm and to begin to identify unmet needs."The state always knew recovery from Superstorm Sandy would take years," New Jersey Health Commissioner Mary O'Dowd said. "In the aftermath of Sandy, the Department of Health recognized the need for research and so we funded this study so we could hear the concerns of recovering families and modify our ongoing Sandy programs to better address the needs of those who are still coping with recovery issues. For example, the Department recently extended programs for behavioral health assistance and lead screening for another year.""It was striking to us and to our field team of over 30 interviewers how Sandy still dominated the lives of so many New Jersey residents," added Rutgers University's Dr. Donna Van Alst, the study's co-Principal Investigator, "even two and a half years after the event. People across the economic spectrum were affected." Other findings from the study revealed that:The findings from this study are based on face-to-face surveys with 1,000 randomly sampled New Jersey residents living in the state's nine most-affected counties. The research team from the four universities deployed a team of nearly three-dozen community-based interviewers to conduct the surveys. In addition, the team used flood storm surge data and housing damage data to identify a "disaster footprint," the geographic area within New Jersey that was exposed to Sandy.The 1,000-person sample was drawn so as to be representative of the 1,047,000 residents living in this Disaster Footprint. The footprint extends from Cape May in the south of the state to several miles north of the George Washington Bridge, and stretches from the shoreline to over 20 miles inland.The study is modeled upon a similar five-year study conducted by Abramson and Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness in Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast Child and Family Health Study. The Sandy study was funded by the New Jersey Department of Health using Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) -- Sandy Supplemental funds. Department of Health Commissioner O'Dowd recognized this study as an opportunity to gain valuable, unprecedented insight on the public health impact of the storm on New Jersey residents and to guide the Department's recovery activities.The first two Briefing Reports were released on July 29, 2015, "The Hurricane Sandy PLACE Report: Evacuation Decisions, Housing Issues, and Sense of Community," and "The Hurricane Sandy PERSON Report: Exposure, health, Economic Burden, and Social Well-Being." Additional Briefing Reports that focus on persistent and unmet needs, and the status of residents' disaster recovery, will be released in the next several months."The similarities between Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy are quite disturbing," noted NYU's Abramson. "Many adults and children are still experiencing emotional and psychological effects, so long after the storm passed. In a significant number of cases housing damage is at the heart of the problem, and it's very concerning to hear that so many of the federally-financed programs have ended even though the needs still clearly persist."Experts are further concerned that the results of this study reflect a pattern that is seen after many large-scale disasters here in the U.S and internationally. "By far, one of the least understood aspects of disaster management is how to make recovery from catastrophic events efficient and rapid, so that people can return to a state of normalcy as quickly as possible," said Irwin Redlener, MD, Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "This prolonged uncertainty and persistent trauma are very difficult for families and especially traumatic for children," added Dr. Redlener, who is president of the Children's Health Fund and a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health.The two reports can be found at: | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
July 27, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150727120222.htm | Researchers find reasons behind increases in urban flooding | Scientists at the University of South Florida's College of Marine Science investigating the increasing risk of 'compound flooding' for major U.S. cities have found that flooding risk is greatest for cities along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts when strong storm surge and high rainfall amounts occur together. While rising sea levels are the main driver for increasing flood risk, storm surges caused by weather patterns that favor high precipitation exacerbates flood potential. | The paper describing their research on the causes of compound flooding in urban areas of the U.S will appear in "Nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population resides in coastal counties," said study lead author Thomas Wahl of the University of South Florida College of Marine Science and the University of Siegen in Germany. "Flooding can have devastating impacts for these low-lying, densely populated and heavily developed regions and have wide-ranging social, economic and environmental consequences."Their analysis focused on the joint occurrence of the two distinct flooding sources in coastal regions -- storm surge and high precipitation -- that can result in direct run-off (pluvial) and increased river discharge (fluvial).The research team also identified three key compound flooding mechanisms: elevated water levels in estuarine regions; storm surge flooding that worsens with heavy rainfall and; moderate storm surge that blocks or slows down drainage.They concluded that "the complex interplay between storm surge and precipitation can lead to, or exacerbate, the impacts of flooding in coastal zones through multiple mechanisms.""Whether or not all of these mechanisms are relevant at a particular site strongly depends on the local setting," explained Wahl who, along with colleagues from the University of South Florida (USF), the University of Maine, and the University of Siegen, in Germany, collected and analyzed data sets for storm surge and rainfall for over 30 American cities along the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts. Their analysis included many of the 17 U.S. port cities with populations over one million, for which the occurrence of compound flooding had not been previously assessed.Armed with data reaching back into the 1950s, and some data from the beginning 20th century for some sites, they determined that the risk for compound flooding was higher for cities along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts than for those on the Pacific coast. Consequently, they looked more closely at selected regions along the Atlantic coast.When they analyzed the data specific for New York City in greater detail, the researchers determined that storm surges in New York City (where compound flooding events are increasing) are accompanied by heavy precipitation when a high pressure system stretches from Newfoundland south over the North Atlantic from where moist air is transported into the low-pressure system causing the storm surge. They also noted that the extreme flooding in that region during "Hurricane Sandy" in 2012 was the result of extreme storm surge but that the rainfall during that storm was (fortunately) "small in the historical context for such an event."Overall, they found that the number of compound flooding events has been steadily increasing over the past century along many stretches of coastline."Our results demonstrate the importance of assessing compound flooding and its links to weather and climate, but we need more research at local scales to determine impacts," concluded Wahl and his colleagues. "That research will require complex, integrated modeling experiments that investigate surface and drainage flows and include storm surge, rainfall and river discharge. In light of climate variability and change, it will be important to develop a detailed understanding of future patterns of storm surge and high precipitation amounts occurring in tandem." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
July 22, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150722115636.htm | Predicting the shape of river deltas | The Mississippi River delta is a rich ecosystem of barrier islands, estuaries, and wetlands that's home to a diverse mix of wildlife -- as well as more than 2 million people. Over the past few decades, the shape of the delta has changed significantly, as ocean waves have carved away at the coastline, submerging and shrinking habitats. | To keep flooding at bay, engineers have erected dams and levees along the river. However, it's unclear how such protective measures will affect the shape of the river delta, and its communities, over time.Now researchers from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have devised a simple way to predict a river delta's shape, given two competing factors: its river's force in depositing sediment into the ocean, and ocean waves' strength in pushing that sediment back along the coast. Depending on the balance of the two, the coastline of a river delta may take on a smooth "cuspate" shape, or a more pointed "crenulated" outline, resembling a bird's foot.The new metric may help engineers determine how the shape of a delta, such as the Mississippi's, may shift in response to engineered structures such as dams and levees, and environmental changes, such as hurricane activity and sea-level rise.Jaap Nienhuis, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Marine Geology and Geophysics, says the effects of climate change, and the human efforts to combat these effects, are already making an impact on river deltas around the world."Because there are so many people living on a river delta, you want to know what its morphology or shape will look like in the future," Nienhuis says. "For the Mississippi, the river supplies a lot of sediment. But because there are a lot of dams on the Mississippi nowadays, there is not as much sand coming down the river, so people are very worried about how this delta will evolve, especially with sea-level rise, over the coming centuries."Nienhuis, and Andrew Ashton and Liviu Glosan of WHOI, report their results in the journal Over hundreds of thousands of years, a river's sand and silt flow toward the coast, ultimately piling up at a river's mouth in the form of a low-lying delta. A delta's coastline can be relatively smooth, with most sand depositing from the main river, or it can fan out in the shape of a bird's foot, as the river bifurcates into tributaries and channels, each of which deposits sand in finger-like projections.Scientists often characterize a delta as either river-dominated or wave-dominated.In a wave-dominated delta, such as the Nile River delta in Egypt, incoming ocean waves are stronger than the river's flow. As a result, waves push outflowing sediment back along the coast, effectively smoothing the coastline. By contrast, a river-dominated delta, such as the Mississippi's, is shaped by a stronger river, which deposits sand faster than ocean waves can push back, creating a crenulated coastline.While this relationship between rivers and ocean waves is generally understood, Nienhuis says there is no formal way to determine when a delta will tip toward a smooth or pointy shape.The researchers came up with a simple ratio to predict a delta's shape, based on a river's sediment flux, or the flow rate of sediment through a river, and the strength of ocean waves, determined by a wave's height, frequency, and angle of approach.Based on the various factors that determine the overall ratio, the team determined the point at which a delta would no longer be a smooth outline, shaped by ocean waves, but instead, a pointy coastline, influenced more by the river."At some point there's so much sediment that you exceed the maximum of what waves can do," Nienhuis says, "and then you become a 'bird foot,' or river-dominated delta, because the river is so much stronger."Nienhuis and his colleagues applied the new method to 25 river deltas on the north shore of the Indonesian island of Java, a region where sediments have deposited on a shallow continental shelf, creating a wide variety of delta shapes.For each delta, the team used a global wave model developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to determine the height, frequency, and direction of each incoming wave. The researchers also used a model to determine the corresponding river's sediment flux.Using data from both models, Nienhuis determined the ratio of river-to-ocean wave strength for each delta, and found that those deltas with a ratio greater than or equal to 1 were more likely to have multiple river channels, with deltas that project out from the shoreline. The main factor determining this transition turned out to be the angle at which ocean waves generally approach the coast: If the angle of approach is 45 degrees or greater, then ocean waves are no longer able to smooth out the amount of sediment coming from a river, tipping a delta's shape toward a river-dominated morphology.Nienhuis says the group's method may help engineers predict the shape a delta may take if erected dams or levees change a river's sediment flow. Similarly, the method may estimate the evolution of deltas with climate change, as rising sea levels and increased hurricane activity will likely alter the behavior and magnitude of ocean waves. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
June 17, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150617175252.htm | Average 'dead zone' predicted for Gulf of Mexico in 2015 | Scientists are expecting that this year's Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone, also called the "dead zone," will be approximately 5,483 square miles or about the size of Connecticut-the same as it has averaged over the last several years. | The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico affects nationally important commercial and recreational fisheries and threatens the region's economy. Hypoxic zones hold very little oxygen, and are caused by excessive nutrient pollution, primarily from activities such as agriculture and wastewater. The low oxygen levels cannot support most marine life and habitats in near-bottom waters.This year marks the first time the results of four models were combined. The four model predictions ranged from 4,344 to 5,985 square miles, and had a collective predictive interval of 3,205 to 7,645 square miles, which take into account variations in weather and oceanographic conditions.The NOAA-sponsored Gulf of Mexico hypoxia forecast has improved steadily in recent years, a result of advancements of individual models and an increase in the number of models used for the forecast. Forecasts based on multiple models are called ensemble forecasts and are commonly used in hurricane and other weather forecasts.The ensemble models were developed by NOAA-sponsored modeling teams and researchers at the University of Michigan, Louisiana State University, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences/College of William and Mary, Texas A&M University, North Carolina State University, and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The hypoxia forecast is part of a larger NOAA effort to deliver ecological forecasts that support human health and well-being, coastal economies, and coastal and marine stewardship."NOAA, along with our partners, continues to improve our capability to generate environmental data that can help mitigate and manage this threat to Gulf fisheries and economies," said Kathryn D. Sullivan, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. "We are adding models to increase the accuracy of our dead zone forecast."The Gulf of Mexico hypoxia forecast is based on nutrient runoff and river stream data from the USGS. The USGS operates more than 3,000 real-time stream gauges, 50 real-time nitrate sensors, and collects water quality data at long-term stations throughout the Mississippi River basin to track how nutrient loads are changing over time.The USGS estimates that 104,000 metric tons of nitrate and 19,300 metric tons of phosphorus flowed down the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers into the Gulf of Mexico in May 2015. This is about 21 percent below the long-term (1980-2014) average for nitrogen, and 16 percent above the long-term average for phosphorus."Real-time nitrate sensors are advancing our understanding of how nitrate is transported in small streams and large rivers, including the main stem of the Mississippi River," said William Werkheiser, USGS associate director for water. "Long-term monitoring is critical to tracking how nutrient levels are changing in response to management actions and for improving modeling tools to estimate which sources and areas are contributing the largest amounts of nutrients to the Gulf. "The confirmed size of the 2015 Gulf hypoxic zone will be released in early August, following a monitoring survey led by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium from July 28 to August 4. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
June 12, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150612131259.htm | New Grand Canyon age research focuses on Western Grand Canyon | The age of the Grand Canyon (USA) has been studied for years, with recent technological advances facilitating new attempts to determine when erosion of this iconic canyon began. The result is sometimes conflicting ages based on different types of data; most data support the notion that the canyon began to erode to its current form about six million years ago. Then even newer, "high-tech," data became available and questions were again raised about whether the western end of the canyon could be older. | Two numbers are used as general time markers for these alternate hypotheses. The first suggests that the canyon may have started incising 17 million years ago. The second suggests that the canyon may have looked largely as it does today 70 million years ago. The time contrast between these hypotheses is striking, and any accurate concept of the canyon would have to be consistent with all observations.Other researchers have studied the Grand Wash Fault, which truncates the western Grand Canyon. The fault runs north to south, nearly perpendicular to the Canyon. The fault slides in such a way that the west side of the fracture moves down relative to the east side, leaving a cliff face called the Grand Wash Cliffs. This slip, called "normal slip," has led to the opening of a valley called the Grand Wash trough along the east end of Lake Meade. Erosion of hillslopes and canyons in the Grand Wash Cliffs is driven by the fault movement exposing the rock at the surface. These hillslopes and canyons are similar to the Colorado River's tributaries in Grand Canyon, except hills and side streams are all steeper in Grand Canyon.This comparison is useful because the Grand Wash fault has been studied extensively, and other scientists have shown that the fault completed most of its sliding between 18 and 12 million years ago. The rocks and climate in both regions are similar, so the difference in landform shape is most likely due to when the landforms started eroding.In this new article for | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
June 11, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150611122659.htm | New tools aiding storm prediction, increasing ship navigational safety in Gulf of Mexico | Hurricane season has arrived. Are you prepared? | Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida may be more prepared than ever, thanks to some new tools that are enhancing the capabilities that provide the foundation of the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS).These tools -- GPS Continually Operating Reference Systems (CORS) and Physical Oceanographic Real-Time System (PORTS®) -- are being put into place through local, state and federal partnershipsand are providing better and more accurate information about the Gulf that will help with storm prediction and aid in ship navigation. The new CORS stations are being funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Geodetic Survey and put into place through the newly formed Gulf Coast Spatial Reference Consortium, a partnership among the Conrad Blucher Institute for Surveying and Science at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Louisiana State University's Center for Geoinformatics, the University of Southern Mississippi's Mississippi Spatial Reference Center and the Alabama Department of Transportation. The consortium provides Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data consisting of carrier phase and code range measurements in support of three dimensional positioning, meteorology, space weather and geophysical applications along the Gulf of Mexico.CORS, which are being added at or near NOAA tide gauges in each Gulf state, provide location data at centimeter-level accuracy. Improved accuracy is necessary for coastal mapping, surveying and restoration, for flood protection and to aid the development of better coastal models for hurricanes and flooding. The tools can also help resource managers better identify long-term trends in sea level rise and the sinking of coastal lands (called coastal subsidence)."We are excited to be part of this project to provide the latest geospatial data with information from tide gauges, sea level observations, land elevation reference points and 3D positioning," said Dr. Gary Jeffress, Director of CBI. "This system will help local and regional leaders plan for improved resilience to any impacts of sea level rise or subsidence and coastal storm surge flooding. The project will assist development of long-term strategies to address coastal change impacts along the northern Gulf of Mexico."When the upgrades are fully implemented, CORS stations will cover some 16,000 miles of shorelines, bays and estuaries. So far, four stations in Florida and five in Texas have been installed; six additional CORS stations will be installed in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana this year, with remaining stations installed in 2016. Several of these stations are being added near busy U.S. ports and population centers in the Gulf of Mexico.NOAA also recently installed PORTS® in two locations in Louisiana. PORTS® is an integrated system of oceanographic and meteorological sensors that provides mariners with accurate and reliable real-time information about environmental conditions in seaports, including water levels, currents, water density and meteorology. The installation of two new PORTS® systems in Louisiana brings the total PORTS® operating in the Gulf to nine.The new Louisiana PORTS® were installed by NOAA at Port Fourchon, which services 90 percent of the Gulf's deepwater oil and gas industry and provides more than 20 percent of the U.S.' daily energy supply, and Morgan City/Atchafalaya Bay, a newly established foreign trade port."Real-time knowledge of the currents, water levels, winds and density of the water can increase the amount of cargo moved through a port and harbor and enable mariners to safely use available channel depths," said Rich Edwing, NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) director. "Even one additional foot of draft can substantially increase the profit of a shipment."Information from these and other sensing instruments in the Gulf of Mexico are provided in real time and near-real time through the GCOOS Regional Association's free and publicly accessible data portal, online at "As a region with rapidly growing communities along low-lying coastal areas and an infrastructure that is critical to our nation's energy security, improving and enhancing our coastal observing systems are vital to our nation's interests," said Dr. Barbara Kirkpatrick, Executive Director of the GCOOS-RA. "More than 14 million people call the Gulf Coast home. The Gulf is also a vital economic driver for the regional and the U.S. economies, providing jobs for 20 million people and generating $234 billion annually."Better predictive capabilities for storms and flooding is of utmost importance to protecting lives, commerce and our nation's energy supply."Enhancing navigation is also important, Kirkpatrick said, when you stop to consider that the Gulf has 14 of the top 20 U.S. ports by tonnage and that in 2012, when Hurricane Isaac forced the closure of a single port, the Port of New Orleans, for four days, it resulted in the estimated loss of more than $400 million and had a ripple effect on the global supply chain. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
May 28, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150528082159.htm | Below-normal Atlantic Hurricane Season is likely this year | NOAA's Climate Prediction Center says the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season will likely be below-normal, but that's no reason to believe coastal areas will have it easy. | For the hurricane season, which officially runs from June 1 -- November 30, NOAA is predicting a 70 percent likelihood of 6 to 11 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher), of which 3 to 6 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including zero to 2 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of 111 mph or higher). While a below-normal season is likely (70 percent), there is also a 20 percent chance of a near-normal season, and a 10 percent chance of an above-normal season."A below-normal season doesn't mean we're off the hook. As we've seen before, below-normal seasons can still produce catastrophic impacts to communities," said NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan, Ph.D., referring to the 1992 season in which only seven named storms formed, yet the first was Andrew -- a Category 5 Major Hurricane that devastated South Florida."The main factor expected to suppress the hurricane season this year is El Niño, which is already affecting wind and pressure patterns, and is forecast to last through the hurricane season," said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. "El Niño may also intensify as the season progresses, and is expected to have its greatest influence during the peak months of the season. We also expect sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic to be close to normal, whereas warmer waters would have supported storm development."Included in today's outlook is Tropical Storm Ana, but its pre-season development is not an indicator of the overall season strength. Ana's development was typical of pre-season named storms, which often form along frontal boundaries in association with a trough in the jet stream. This method of formation differs from the named storms during the peak of the season, which originate mainly from low-pressure systems moving westward from Africa, and are independent of frontal boundaries and the jet stream.With the new hurricane season comes a new prototype storm surge watch/warning graphic from NOAA's National Hurricane Center, intended to highlight areas along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States that have a significant risk of life-threatening inundation by storm surge from a tropical cyclone.The new graphic will introduce the concept of a watch or warning specific to the storm surge hazard. Storm surge is often the greatest threat to life and property from a tropical cyclone, and it can occur at different times and at different locations from a storm's hazardous winds. In addition, while most coastal residents can remain in their homes and be safe from a tropical cyclone's winds, evacuations are often needed to keep people safe from storm surge. Having separate warnings for these two hazards should provide emergency managers, the media, and the general public better guidance on the hazards they face when tropical cyclones threaten.Also new this season is a higher resolution version (2 km near the storm area) of NOAA's Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting model (HWRF), thanks to the upgrades to operational computing. A new 40-member HWRF ensemble-based data assimilation system will also be implemented to make better use of aircraft reconnaissance-based Tail Doppler Radar data for improved intensity forecasts. Retrospective testing of 2015 HWRF upgrades demonstrated a five percent improvement in the intensity forecasts compared to last year."It only takes one hurricane or tropical storm making landfall in your community to significantly disrupt your life," said FEMA Deputy Administrator Joseph Nimmich. "Everyone should take action now to prepare themselves and their families for hurricanes and powerful storms. Develop a family communications plan, build an emergency supply kit for your home, and take time to learn evacuation routes for your area. Knowing what to do ahead of time can literally save your life and help you bounce back stronger and faster should disaster strike in your area." | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
May 27, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150527150948.htm | Summer tropical storms don't fix drought conditions | Popular opinion says that tropical storms and hurricanes that make landfall mitigate droughts in the southeastern United States. | But that simply isn't true, according to a Florida State University researcher.Vasu Misra, associate professor of meteorology, disputed the commonly held belief in an article published in the journal "The perception that land-falling tropical cyclones serve to replenish the terrestrial water sources in many of the small watersheds in the southeastern U.S. seems to be a myth," Misra said. "This perception is widespread because the southeastern United States has the largest share of land-falling tropical cyclones in the country."Misra and Satish Bastola from Georgia Institute of Technology examined historical rainfall records and from that, created a soil moisture-based drought index for 28 watersheds across the southeastern United States for a 58-year period. They then reconstructed the database by eliminating the rainfall on days when a tropical storm or hurricane had made landfall.The end result? Soil moisture levels in these watersheds remained about the same.That's because the atmospheric circulation during summer droughts often create favorable conditions for steering a tropical storm or hurricane away from land.Additionally, when tropical cyclones do make landfall, it is usually during a season when the soil is already wet. The additional saturation does nothing for the overall soil moisture conditions, Misra said.According to a NOAA report, 37.4 percent of the contiguous United States was experiencing moderate drought at the end of April.For the 2015 Atlantic storm season, which begins June 1, the Weather Channel has projected a total of nine named storms, five hurricanes and one major hurricane. The 30-year average is 12 named storms, six hurricanes and three major hurricanes.This study was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
May 18, 2015 | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150518121358.htm | Climate change altering frequency, intensity of hurricanes | Climate change may be the driving force behind fewer, yet more powerful hurricanes and tropical storms, says a Florida State geography professor. | In a paper published today by "We're seeing fewer hurricanes, but the ones we do see are more intense," Elsner said. "When one comes, all hell can break loose."Prior to this research, there had been some discussions among scientists about how warmer ocean temperatures affected the intensity of a hurricane. Elsner and Kang wanted to further explore that concept as well as the number of storms that occurred each year.Hurricanes can form when ocean waters are 79 degrees Fahrenheit or more. As the warm water evaporates, it provides the energy a storm needs to become a hurricane. Higher temperatures mean higher levels of energy, which would ultimately affect wind speed.Specifically, Elsner and Kang projected that over the past 30 years, storm speeds have increased on average by 1.3 meters per second -- or 3 miles per hour -- and there were 6.1 fewer storms than there would have been if land and water temperatures had remained constant."It's basically a tradeoff between frequency and intensity," Elsner said.According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Earth is roughly 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was last century.Elsner and Kang said the yearly temperatures can also be a good indicator of what's yet to come in a given storm season."In a warmer year, stronger but fewer tropical cyclones are likely to occur," said Kang, now deputy director of the National Typhoon Center in South Korea. "In a colder year, on the other hand, weaker but more tropical cyclones."For the 2015 Atlantic storm season, which begins June 1, a total of nine named storms, five hurricanes and one major hurricane have been projected. The 30-year average is 12 named storms, six hurricanes and three major hurricanes.The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Institute at Florida State supported this research. | Hurricanes Cyclones | 2,015 |
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