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Enhancing Earthquake Resilience by Updating Steel Building Standard
Since the mid-1990s, a type of steel column that commonly features slender cross-sectional elements has become more prevalent in buildings along the West Coast of the United States and in other seismically active regions. Although these columns have complied with modern design standards, expert say that our understanding of how they would perform during an earthquake has been limited by a lack of full-scale testing.
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Cities Boosted Rain, Sent Storms to the Suburbs During Europe’s Deadly Summer Floods
When it comes to extreme weather, climate change usually gets all the attention. But according to a new study, the unique effects of cities – which can intensify storms and influence where rain falls – need to be accounted for as well.
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Compound-Flood Modeling Tools Hel Build Community Climate Resilience
In 2021, extreme flooding from rain affected residents across the United States, causing property damage and loss of life. These extreme weather events are becoming all too common. In fact, a recent United Nations report—Climate Change 2021—found that heavy rain events are likely to become more intense and frequent, resulting in an increase in severe flooding events around the globe.
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December in Texas Hottest on Record in More Than 130 Years
The state climatologist says last month was the warmest December since 1889. From Dallas through Abilene to Del Rio, temperatures averaged 5 to 9 degrees above normal.
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Antarctica’s “Doomsday” Glacier: How Its Collapse Could Trigger Global Floods and Swallow Islands
Driven by global warming, sea level has risen around 20cm since 1900, an amount which is already forcing coastal communities out of their homes and exacerbating environmental problems such as flooding, saltwater contamination and habitat loss. The massive Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica is similar in size to Great Britain, and it contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 65cm if it were to completely collapse. The worry is that Thwaites might not be the only glacier to go.
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Controlled Burning of Natural Environments Could Help Offset Carbon Emissions
Planting trees and suppressing wildfires do not necessarily maximize the carbon storage of natural ecosystems. A new study has found that prescribed burning can actually lock in or increase carbon in the soils of temperate forests, savannahs and grasslands.
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What Are the Geopolitical Risks of Manipulating the Climate?
It would only take one country—watching its crops shrivel or its water run dry—deciding to take a chance to set in motion a global geoengineering climate experiment, and technologies which could, for example, block the sun’s rays or siphon huge amounts of carbon from the air are not that far out of reach. The effects could get out of hand quickly. Yet the international community has not established the kinds of guardrails you might expect for potentially world-changing technologies. As a result, no single governing body is overseeing geoengineering efforts on a global scale.
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The Use of Earthquake Science for Assessing Risks to Gas Pipelines
New study highlights the need to continue efforts to systematically quantify nationwide earthquake risk to gas pipelines in the United States, which manages the largest gas pipeline network in the world.
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Simulation Models of Potential Asteroid Collisions
An asteroid impact can be enough to ruin anyone’s day, but several small factors can make the difference between an out-of-this-world story and total annihilation.
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Improving Estimates of Population Exposed to Sea Level Rise: Not as Straightforward as It May Seem
An analysis of data from 2015 finds that between 750 million and more than a billion people globally resided in the ≤ 10 meters low elevation coastal zone (LECZ), up from 521 million and 745 million in 1990. Understanding the number and location of people living LECZ is necessary for policy makers and communities preparing for and adapting to impacts from sea level rise caused by climate change.
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Increasingly Frequent Wildfires Linked to Human-Caused Climate Change: Study
New research strengthens the case that climate change has been the main cause of the growing amount of land in the western U.S. that has been destroyed by large wildfires over the past two decades.
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2021’s Climate Disasters Revealed an East-West Weather Divide, with One Side of the Country Too Wet, the Other Dangerously Dry
Alongside a lingering global pandemic, the year 2021 was filled with climate disasters, some so intense they surprised even the scientists who study them. Many of these extreme weather events have been linked to human-caused climate change, and they offer a glimpse of what to expect in a rapidly warming world. In the U.S., something in particular stood out: a sharp national precipitation divide, with one side of the country too wet, the other too dry.
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Has Winter Blown Off Course?
What in the world is going on in the West? Some say that climate change has affected this year’s winter in the Western region of the country, while others are wondering what the lack of snowpack might mean for regional water supply, which is already in a precarious state.
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New Tool Pinpoints Natural Disaster Risk Down to County Level
NOAA has released an innovative mapping tool that provides county-level information on natural disaster hazards across the United States. This new feature provides significant enhancements to the state-level data on NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Disasters website.
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Tornadoes and Climate Change: What a Warming World Means for Deadly Twisters and the Type of Storms That Spawn Them
The deadly tornado outbreak that tore through communities from Arkansas to Illinois on the night of Dec. 10-11, 2021, was so unusual in its duration and strength, particularly for December, that a lot of people including the U.S. president are asking what role climate change might have played – and whether tornadoes will become more common in a warming world. Both questions are easier asked than answered, but research is offering new clues.
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The long view
Strengthening School Violence Prevention
Violence by K-12 students is disturbingly common. Ensuring that schools have effective ways to identify and prevent such incidents is becoming increasingly important. Expanding intervention options and supporting K-12 school efforts in Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management (BTAM) would help.
Huge Areas May Face Possibly Fatal Heat Waves if Warming Continues
A new assessment warns that if Earth’s average temperature reaches 2 degrees C over the preindustrial average, widespread areas may become too hot during extreme heat events for many people to survive without artificial cooling.
Trump’s Cuts to Federal Wildfire Crews Could Have “Scary” Consequences
President Donald Trump’s moves to slash the federal workforce have gutted the ranks of wildland firefighters and support personnel, fire professionals warn, leaving communities to face deadly consequences when big blazes arrive this summer. States, tribes and fire chiefs are preparing for a fire season with minimal federal support.