Wednesday, July 6, 2022
SCIENMAG: Latest Science and Health News
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME PAGE
  • BIOLOGY
  • CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS
  • MEDICINE
    • Cancer
    • Infectious Emerging Diseases
  • SPACE
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME PAGE
  • BIOLOGY
  • CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS
  • MEDICINE
    • Cancer
    • Infectious Emerging Diseases
  • SPACE
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Scienmag - Latest science news from science magazine
No Result
View All Result
Home SCIENCE NEWS Mathematics

Study of harvey flooding aids in quantifying climate change

June 10, 2021
in Mathematics
0
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

IMAGE

Credit: Michael Wehner, Berkeley Lab

How much do the effects of climate change contribute to extreme weather events? It’s hard to say–the variables involved are plentiful, each event is unique, and we can only do so much to investigate what didn’t happen. But a new paper from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) climate scientist Michael Wehner investigates the question for one particular element of one significant storm and makes the results available to those who lived through it.

In the paper, “Attributable human-induced changes in the magnitude of flooding in the Houston, Texas region during Hurricane Harvey,” published May 19 in Climatic Change, Wehner and Christopher Sampson from Fathom Bristol used a hydraulic model–a mathematical model that can analyze the flow of fluid through a particular system of natural or human-made channels–to consider the degree to which human-caused climate change may have affected flooding in and around Houston during the massive 2017 storm, and the ways in which that flooding was distributed. Wehner and Sampson used resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to quantify the increase in Houston flood area and depth from the hydraulic model output and to host a portal where other scientists and the public can access the data for their own use.

From August 26 through August 31, 2017, Hurricane Harvey stalled over the Houston area, flooding 154,000 structures and 600,000 cars; 37,000 people were displaced, and more than 70 died in the floodwaters. Adjusted for inflation, it was the second-most financially expensive tropical storm in United States history, costing between $85 billion and $125 billion.

Using previously published estimates (Risser and Wehner 2017; Von Oldenborg et al 2017; Wang et al 2018) stating a range of a 7% to 38% increase in precipitation during Hurricane Harvey due to climate change, Wehner and Sampson applied a hydraulic model to produce a range of simulations showing the distribution of flooding around the Houston area, illustrating a variety of outcomes for different levels of attribution to climate change.

According to Wehner, the computational simplicity of hydraulic models allows for extremely fine resolution simulations –in this case, about 30 meters (100 feet), or approximately the size of a single house and yard. Because of the granularity of the data, residents themselves can use the model to check the flood status of their homes or blocks in different modeled scenarios and see how climate change may have affected them directly.

“[The amount of flooding you experienced] depends a lot on where you are, whether you were victimized by the flood first of all, and then by whether climate change caused that flooding or not,” said Wehner. “That’s why this is an interesting data set. It’s so high-resolution that people can search for their own houses, or at least their own blocks, and see whether their house was flooded because of climate change–at least according to these simulations.”

That’s part of the impetus of this study, he emphasized: not just publishing the results, but making them easily available to other professional scientists, community scientists, and any member of the public who wants to look at them. For example, Wehner has already begun sharing his data with a team of social scientists who plan to use the data to study the disproportionate distribution of impacts across ethnic groups in Houston. On a broader scale, a public-facing portal hosted at NERSC offers Wehner and Sampson’s data in easily downloadable form, in addition to links to free software.

“It’s a scientific paper, but it’s really motivated as a public outreach,” said Wehner. “I’m trying to empower the public to go out and do their own finding, for people to say, ‘I want to know if climate change impacted my neighborhood.'”

In addition to community science and passing data on to other researchers, this study may also contribute to research on the economic impacts of climate change.

“At the end of the day, our best estimate is that 14% to 15% of the cost of flooding during Hurricane Harvey is because of climate change, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot…but $13 billion does. And that’s going to grow as climate change continues,” said Wehner.

###

Media Contact
Kathy Kincade
[email protected]

Original Source

http://cs.lbl.gov/news-media/news/2021/study-of-harvey-flooding-aids-in-quantifying-climate-change/

Related Journal Article

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03114-z

Tags: Algorithms/ModelsAtmospheric ScienceClimate ChangeClimate ScienceComputer ScienceEarth ScienceMathematics/StatisticsWeather/Storms
Share25Tweet16Share4ShareSendShare
  • Neurovascular injury from SARS-CoV-2

    Small NIH study reveals how immune response triggered by COVID-19 may damage the brain

    71 shares
    Share 28 Tweet 18
  • Scientists discover cancer trigger that could spur targeted drug therapies

    70 shares
    Share 28 Tweet 18
  • Researchers uncover life’s power generators in the Earth’s oldest groundwaters

    67 shares
    Share 27 Tweet 17
  • COVID-19 fattens up our body’s cells to fuel its viral takeover

    99 shares
    Share 40 Tweet 25
  • Study shows convalescent plasma doesn’t benefit severely ill patients hospitalized with COVID-19

    65 shares
    Share 26 Tweet 16
  • Do early therapies help very young children with or at high likelihood for autism?

    82 shares
    Share 33 Tweet 21
ADVERTISEMENT

About us

We bring you the latest science news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Latest NEWS

COVID-19 fattens up our body’s cells to fuel its viral takeover

nTIDE May 2022 COVID Update: Uncertainty about inflation tempers good news for people with disabilities

The pair of Orcas deterring Great White Sharks – by ripping open their torsos for livers

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 190 other subscribers

© 2022 Scienmag- Science Magazine: Latest Science News.

No Result
View All Result
  • HOME PAGE
  • BIOLOGY
  • CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS
  • MEDICINE
    • Cancer
    • Infectious Emerging Diseases
  • SPACE
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • CONTACT US

© 2022 Scienmag- Science Magazine: Latest Science News.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Posting....