• California's Wildfire Season Has Lengthened, and Its Peak Is Now Earlier in the Year

    California’s wildfire problem, fueled by a concurrence of climate change and a heightened risk of human-caused ignitions in once uninhabited areas, has been getting worse with each passing year of the 21st century.Researchers have found that the annual burn season has lengthened in the past two decades and that the yearly peak has shifted from August to July.

  • New Tool Could Guide Floodwater Management and Combat Ongoing Drought

    Using a new computer framework, scientists are able to project future floodwaters under a changing climate. The approach could help California water managers plan for and redirect floodwaters toward groundwater aquifers, alleviating both flood and drought risks.

  • Lessons from Past Emergencies Could Improve the Pandemic Response

    The lack of accountability, poor communication and insufficient planning plaguing the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — especially in its early months — have roots in how the nation responded to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the H1N1 swine flu, a new study finds.

  • Texas House Targets Power Grid Flaw that Cut Electricity to Natural Gas Facilities and Worsened February Blackouts

    The lower chamber gave initial approval Monday to a series of bill responding to this year’s catastrophic power outages during a deadly winter storm.

  • Combining News Media and AI to Rapidly Identify Flooded Buildings

    Artificial intelligence (AI) has sped up the process of detecting flooded buildings immediately after a large-scale flood, allowing emergency personnel to direct their efforts efficiently. Now, researchers have created a machine learning (ML) model that uses news media photos to identify flooded buildings accurately within 24 hours of the disaster.

  • Negative Emissions, Positive Economy

    The long-term goals of the Paris Agreement — keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius and ideally 1.5 C in order to avert the worst impacts of climate change — may not be achievable by greenhouse gas emissions-reduction measures alone. Most scenarios for meeting these targets also require the deployment of negative emissions technologies (NETs) that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage could help stabilize the climate without breaking the bank.

  • How Do We Know Whether an Asteroid Headed Our Way Is Dangerous?

    There are a lot of things that pose a threat to our planet – climate change, natural disasters, and solar flares, for example. But one threat in particular often captures public imagination, finding itself popularized in books and films and regularly generating alarming headlines: asteroids.

  • The U.S. Water and Wastewater Crisis – How Many Wake-up Calls Are Enough?

    In February, much of Texas plunged into darkness when the state’s electricity grid failed due to extreme cold weather conditions. What started as a foreseeable blackout quickly became a life-threatening calamity. “This catastrophe illustrates what happens when aging and inadequate infrastructure is hit by extreme rain or snow—an increasingly regular occurrence due to climate change,” Lucía Falcón Palomar, Obinna Maduka, and JoAnn Kamuf Ward write. “And, the matter extends well beyond Texas. It is easy to forget that, within U.S. borders, communities have long endured the conditions seen in Texas in February.”

  • Florida Governor Working to Prevent “Catastrophic Flood” of Toxic Wastewater in Tampa Area

    Florida governor Ron DeSantis has vowed to prevent a “catastrophic flood” near the major city of Tampa. A leaking toxic wastewater reservoir has the potential to cause an environmental crisis in the region.

  • Integration Can Prevent Failures in Large Power Grids

    The recent power outages in Texas brought attention to its power grid being separated from the rest of the country. While it is not immediately clear whether integration with other parts of the national grid would have completely eliminated the need for rolling outages, the state’s inability to import significant amounts of electricity was decisive in the blackout.

  • The Promise of Forecasting Meteotsunamis

    Scientists have, for the first time, documented meteotsunami in the Great Lakes caused by an atmospheric inertia-gravity wave. An atmospheric inertia-gravity wave is a wave of air that can run from 6 to 60 miles long that is created when a mass of stable air is displaced by an air mass with significantly different pressure. This sets in motion a wave of air with rising and falling pressure that can influence the water below, as it synchronizes with water movement on the lake’s surface like two singers harmonizing.

  • Climate Change Has Cost 7 years of Ag Productivity Growth

    Despite important agricultural advancements to feed the world in the last 60 years, a Cornell-led study shows that global farming productivity is 21 percent lower than it could have been without climate change. This is the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases since the 1960s.

  • Climate Change Significantly Increases Population Displacement Risk

    The risk of people being forced from their homes by flooding increases by half for each additional degree of global warming, as an international research team led by the Weather and Climate Risks Group at ETH Zurich demonstrate.

  • Homeland Security for Radiological and Nuclear Threats

    Radiation exposure events are complicated: there is a variety of radiation sources, and since radiation is invisible, and its effect may not always be immediately apparent, first responders and emergency services must prepare for a “worried well” of people requiring attention: individuals who do not have other physical injuries but are concerned about whether they have received a radiation exposure.

  • Almost 70% of ERCOT customers lost power during winter storm, study finds

    Texans in ERCOT’s service area who lost electricity were without power for an average of 42 hours, according to the study. They had been told to prepare for short-term, rolling outages.