Named storms Hurricanes Cat
Figure 2.2 Number of total named storms, hurricanes and category 4-5 storms since 1851, filtered by an 11-year running mean Note Based on data obtainable from www.aoml.noaa.gov hrd hurdat . Intensity of major hurricanes prior to 1970 is adjusted following Landsea. Source Courtesy of J. Belanger. Atlantic. Figure 2.4 shows the time series of total named storms and the average SST in the main development region of the North Atlantic. Comparison of the two time series shows coherent variations of...
Gulf Coast physiographic setting
The US Gulf Coast physiographic region extends from Brownsville, Texas to the Florida Keys and encompasses the coastal plain, low hills, barrier islands, estuaries and river deltas of the northern Gulf of Mexico. Sediments consist of coastal plain deposits and thick land-derived sediments on the outer continental shelf that, ultimately, transition to evaporite and carbonate deposits in deep offshore waters. While the coastal margin is considered tectonically stable, its geomorphic features are...
Health impacts from heat stress and air pollution
Model projections clearly predict more frequent and more intense summertime heat waves, along with greater instability of weather patterns, much like the searing temperatures in the summer of 2006 in the US and Europe. Heat stress is likely to increase morbidity and mortality and lead to adverse impacts on food production. At the same time, adverse impacts from exposure to cold temperatures are likely to decline. Societies can adapt in ways that can limit significant damage to public health by,...
Stephen P Leatherman
Dr Leatherman is Director of the International Hurricane Research Center IHRC as well as the Director for their Laboratory of Coastal Research. His major research focus is storm impacts on coastal areas, including high-technology mapping with airborne lasers. He served for many years on the National Academy of Sciences Post-Storm Disaster Field Team that was dispatched from Washington DC to survey hurricane damage and thus has considerable first-hand experience with these disasters. Dr...
Rabbi Warren G Stone
Rabbi Warren Stone has served as rabbi of Temple Emanuel in the Washington metropolitan area in Kensington, Maryland since 1988 when he arrived in the Washington area after serving congregations in California and Texas. He is known nationally for his work on religion and the environment he is the founding and current chair of the Central Conference of American Rabbis' Committee on the Environment he was the sole Jewish UN delegate to the Kyoto conference in 1997 he has led delegations on...
Eric S Kasischke
Dr Kasischke is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Maryland College Park. He has an adjunct appointment of Senior Research Associate at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where he serves as Senior Investigator on the Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research Program. He spent his early career working for the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he conducted research on airborne and spaceborne remotely sensed data. His doctoral...
Linkage to increased tropical sea surface temperature
The increase in global hurricane intensity since 1970 has been associated directly with a global increase in tropical sea surface temperature Emanuel, 2005 Webster et al, 2005 Hoyos et al, 2006 . Figure 2.3 shows the variation of tropical sea surface temperature SST in each of the ocean regions where tropical cyclone storms form. In each of these regions, SST has increased by approximately 0.5 C or 1 F since 1970. The causal link between SST and hurricane intensity was established over 50 years...
Tropical storms
The most extensive flooding, shoreline erosion and wetland loss in the Gulf Coast region occurs during hurricanes and lesser tropical storms. An increase in the frequency or intensity of tropical storms entering the Gulf of Mexico could have serious consequences for human settlements and natural ecosystems along this low-lying coastal margin. During Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, for example, about 300 km2 of land in south Louisiana were converted to open water, according to preliminary...
References Kvr
Abrahams, M. J. and A. Matlin, 1994 East River Tidal Barrage, in D. Hill ed. The East River Tidal Barrage, Volume 742, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New York Academy of Sciences, New York Bowman, M. J., B. Colle, R. Flood, D. Hill, R. Wilson, F. Buonaiuto, P. Cheng and Y. Zheng, 2005 Hydrologie Feasibility of Storm Surge Barriers to Protect the Metropolitan New York New Jersey Region. Final Report, Marine Sciences Research Center, State University of New York, Stony Brook NY...
Recent changes to the fire regime and permafrost
In addition to the warming of the climate over the past half-century, interior Alaska has also seen changes to the fire regime and a warming of permafrost. Figure 13.6 presents the annual burned area in the entire state of Alaska for 1950 to 2006, where over 95 per cent of the total occurs in the interior region. For the past 22 years 1985 2006 , the average burned area increased by 70 per cent compared to the previous 35 years 1950-1984 , reaching 520,000 ha y-1. The increase in fire activity...
References Daq
Abdalati, W., W. Krabill, E. Frederick, S. Manizade, C. Martin, J. Sonntag, R. Swift, R. Thomas, W. Wright and J. Yungel, 2001 Outlet glacier and margin elevation changes Near-coastal thinning of the Greenland Ice Sheet, J. Geophys. Res., 106 D24 , 3372933741 Chen, J., C. Wilson and B. Tapley, 2006 Satellite gravity measurements confirm accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet, Science, 313, 1958-1960 Gregory, J., P. Huybrechts and S. Raper, 2004 Climatology Threatened loss of the...
Reducing coastal risk
With so many living on the coastal edge, how can society reduce the inevitable risks of living near the shore Beach nourishment is seen by an increasing number of coastal communities as an alternative to forcing people to move from the coasts, even though many replenished beaches have lasted only a few years rather than decades for most locations, this strategy cannot work in the long term. Armoring the beach with seawalls can stabilize the shore, but the monetary and aesthetic costs are very...
Increasing Vulnerability of Alaskas Boreal Forest as a Result of Climate
Eric S. Kasischke and F. Stuart Chapin III The boreal region extends across the Earth's land surface between around 50 N and 67 N and covers some 15 million square kilometers. The biomes found in this region include forests, wetlands, peatlands and sub-alpine alpine tundra. Most of this region has an average annual surface temperature around 0 C, with long, cold winters average January low temperatures lt -30 C and short, warm summers average July high temperatures gt 20 C . This temperature...
Bruce C Douglas
Mr Douglas has been a Research Professor in the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University since 2000. Prior to that he was Director of NOAA's National Oceanographic Data Center, and Senior Research Scientist in the Geography Department at the University of Maryland. His special research interests are global sea level rise and coastal impacts of sea level rise. He has published many widely-cited papers on these topics, and is co-editor of the 2001 book Sea Level Rise...
Potential Increased Hurricane Activity in a Greenhouse Warmed World
The prospect of increased hurricane intensity in a greenhouse warmed world is arguably the greatest short-term risk from greenhouse warming. With observations of increased hurricane activity emerging, the risk appears to be increasing even more rapidly than has been expected based on the initial studies. That the situation was more serious than had been thought became clear during 2005, both because of the record-breaking North Atlantic hurricane season and because of papers published by...
Erin Frey
Ms Frey is a member of the class of 2008 at Harvard University, where she is majoring in Environmental Science and Public Policy with a minor in Economics. Especially interested in economic solutions to energy and environmental problems, she is currently writing her senior honors thesis on the intersection of economic incentives, government regulations and the abatement of greenhouse gasses. After graduation, Ms Frey plans to attend graduate school and pursue her doctorate in environmental...
Robert W Corell
Dr Corell is currently Director of the Global Change Program at The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, and also a Senior Policy Fellow at the Policy Program of the American Meteorological Society. He is actively engaged in research on the sciences of global change and the interface between science and public policy. He is currently also serving as Chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, as co-chair of an international strategic planning group that is...
Kahlid Shaukat
Dr Khalid Shaukat was born in India in 1943, migrated to Pakistan with his parents in 1956, and continued his college education in Karachi, Pakistan. He has bachelor's degrees in physics and civil engineering from the University of Karachi. He obtained his graduate degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech in 1970. Since migrating to the US in 1969, he has been involved in scientific and engineering research, especially in physics, mathematics and astronomy. Over the last three decades he...
William A Nitze
Mr Nitze has been working on energy and environmental issues for most of his career. He currently serves as chairman of two companies that are developing clean energy technologies GridPoint, Inc., which designs, manufactures and markets intelligent energy management systems and Oceana Energy Company, which is developing an innovative technology for converting tidal energy into electricity. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of the Climate Institute, and serves on the board of the Galapagos...
Andrew E Derocher
Dr Derocher is Professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta. His research group focuses on the ecology, conservation and management of large carnivores with the aim to improve our understanding of how they are affected by human activities. Over the past 25 years, his primary research has focused on polar bears in both the North American and European Arctic. His research group works closely with territorial and federal government agencies. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of...
Characteristics of tropical and extratropical storms in the Metropolitan region
The height and reach of storm surges and flooding along low-lying coastlines are influenced by a variety of factors, including offshore morphology, coastline geometry, astronomical tides and both the regional and local wind and pressure fields. Tropical for example, hurricanes and extra-tropical for example, nor'easters storm systems are associated with different wind and pressure fields, and these produce characteristically different storm surges. Extra-tropical storms cover a larger...
Michael C MacCracken
Dr MacCracken is Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs at the Climate Institute in Washington DC. His activities focus on improving scientific and public understanding of climate change and its impacts. From 2003 to 2007, he also served as the president of the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences, and an international panel that he served on recently completed the report Confronting Climate Change Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable From...
The Stony Brook storm surge models
In order to better understand regional and local meteorology and oceanography, and to advance storm surge science, the Stony Brook Storm Surge Group has been developing modern, integrated weather storm surge hind-casting and predictive models, typically running with 60-hour time horizons. We analyze both historical and current surge events for coastal New York, Long Island Sound, the NY-NJ Harbor estuary system, and northern New Jersey Bowman et al, 2005 Colle et al, in review . See http...
Storm surge barriers The New England experience
Although dwarfed in scale by the European barriers, three New England barriers constructed during the 1960s have some design features and operating characteristics that might be relevant to the New York metropolitan region. Barriers across open waterways exist at three locations Stamford CT, Providence RI and New Bedford MA. The construction of hurricane-flood protection for the region was authorized by Congress in the Flood Control Act of 5 July 1958 Public Law 85-500, 85th Congress . The...
Admiral James M Loy
In 2005, Admiral Loy completed a 45-year career in public service, retiring as the first Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. In this capacity, he was involved in all aspects of consolidating 22 separate agencies into one unified cabinet department as well as managing the day-to-day activities of the agency. Prior to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, Admiral Loy served in the Transportation Security Administration as Chief Operating Officer and Under Secretary...
Walter E Grazer
Mr Grazer retired from his position as Director of the Environmental Justice Program and Policy Advisor for Religious Liberty, Human Rights and European Affairs for the United States Catholic Conference in June 2007. Formerly, he served as Deputy Director for Migration and Refugee Services, and as Policy Advisor for Food, Agriculture and Rural Development at the Conference. He has worked for the US Catholic Conference for 25 years. Prior to his service at the USCC, he directed the Social...
References
Aldhous, P., 2004 Borneo is burning, Nature, 432, 144-146 Alley, R. B., P. U. Clark, P. Huybrechts and I. Joughlin, 2005 Ice-sheet and sea-level changes, Science, 310, 456-460 American Meteorological Society, 2006 Is global warming impacting, or expected to impact, hurricanes , Science Seminar Series, October 20, 2006, see www.ametsoc.org Andreae, M. O., C. D. Jones and P. M. Cox, 2005 Strong present-day aerosol cooling implies a hot future, Nature, 435, 1187-1190 Angert, A., S. Biraud, C....
Corporate involvement
In the last few years, many multinational corporations and US businesses have committed themselves to addressing climate change. Large companies are able to use their market power to influence the types of products consumers buy. Some companies have realized this, and are now leveraging their market power and offering increasingly environmentally friendly products to their customers. For example Home Depot, one of the largest suppliers of lumber in the US, has decided to sell only certified...
Acknowledgements Fsk
This book is the result of a remarkable conference that marked the 20th Anniversary of the Climate Institute. The Washington Summit on Climate Stabilization had two principal objectives to provide an accurate picture of the risks that climate change might accelerate past the point at which humanity and ecosystems could reasonably adapt, and to outline the beginnings of a public private partnership to pioneer in comprehensive, pro-active Climate Protection Strategies that might provide humanity...