Climate change infographic hurricanes9/25/2023 ![]() "When you're talking about flood resiliency in a coastal zone, you probably need to be looking on the order of 50 to 100 years out," Berginnis says.Three weeks after the impact of Tropical Storm Eta (5 November 2020), Hurricane Iota (18 November 2020) hit northern Honduras heavily affecting the communities around the Sula Valley, including Copán, Choluteca, and Comayagua, and worsening the situation in the departments of Puerto Cortés, Yoro, Atlántida, Santa Barbara, Olancho, and Colón, that were previously hit by the first storm. But with climate change guaranteed to cause more risk for decades to come, local governments must think beyond the next two decades. In the past, he says, it was standard practice to plan about 20 years into the future. We need to be intentional in building resilience into those decisions."īerginnis says local planning officials in coastal areas are already reacting to climate change by thinking longer-term. The same size, the same location, the same way. "For instance, we can't replace infrastructure in-kind. "A study like this is a reminder that we can't do things the same old way," says Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. One way to prepare for wetter hurricanes is to upgrade infrastructure, for example, by elevating roads or diverting water away from power and wastewater treatment plants. "In the future climate, these will become frequent events that we definitely have to prepare for," says Lin. But when you add heavy rain to the mix, it leads to novel and dangerous flooding over a much larger area.įor example, when Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina it caused prolonged flooding across much of the state, including areas far from the coast, due to both storm surge and rain-swollen rivers. "In this study, we emphasize that rainfall is going to be a big player in the future flood risk," says Lin.Ĭoastal areas are accustomed to tidal flooding during hurricanes, because storm surge has historically been the dominant danger associated with storms making landfall, says Lin. That's a big deal for coastal communities, says Ning Lin, an environmental engineer at Princeton and one of the authors of the study, which was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. So a storm that used to have less than a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year will instead have about a 10% chance of happening. In New England and the Mid-Atlantic, the authors estimate more than a 100-fold increase in hurricanes that bring both heavy rain and extremely high tides. The largest increase in risk was in the Northeast. In the future, people living on most of the Gulf Coast and East Coast will likely experience such a storm over the course of a lifetime. Hurricanes that cause compound flooding in coastal areas will become much more frequent by the end of the century, they found. Along both the Gulf Coast and the East Coast, it has been unlikely that a person would experience such a storm over the course of their lifetime.īut when the scientists turned their attention to the future, and factored in climate change, it was a different story. They found that, in the past, such storms have been rare. ![]() ![]() They began by looking backward, to see how frequently hurricanes cause both extreme storm surge and extreme rain. Scientists at Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to know if such storms will happen more frequently in the future. ![]()
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