Rising Sea Levels Call for Rising Wetlands
Amid the search for protection against rising sea levels, many have turned to remediating or reconstructing traditional wetland ecosystems.
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flooding
Where Categorizing Hurricanes Falls Short
Hurricane Katrina was one of the most devastating hurricanes in history, leading to over 1800 fatalities and tying Hurricane Harvey as the costliest hurricane on record. But at the time Katrina made landfall, it was “only” ranked as Category 3 by the Saffir-Simpson scale, which goes up to Category 5. So why did Katrina, at only Category 3, cause so much more destruction than most Category 5 storms? And what does that tell us about what the Saffir-Simpson scale is missing?
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Double trouble: how floods after bushfire affect the health of our rivers
Between Christmas 2019 and the 2020 New Year, forested mountain ranges across drought-stricken areas in Eastern Australia came alight, with fires ravaging 11 million hectares of bush (Eucalyptus woodlands and rainforests) – a size comparable to England’s land area. These megafires threw the states of New South Wales and Victoria into a state of emergency. The bushfire crisis took a sudden turn when heavy rainfall flooded the scorched land in the span of just two weeks. Unfortunately, while rainfall might appear to be a blessing in light of the megafires, the resulting floods were ultimately not sweet relief for rivers.
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Drones prove to be useful tools for flood data collection
As climate change leads to rising sea levels and coastal erosion, drones are proving to be a reliable, economical, and timely tool for real-time data collection of flooding and flood damage – especially in remote and resource-poor regions around the world.
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Summertime Sadness: Hurricanes and Water Quality
Hurricanes are natural disasters that can turn water quality nasty! Just how nasty depends on what’s on the land that’s being flooded. Hurricane Fran (1996) struck the Cape Fear region in southeastern North Carolina, and researchers from the University of North Carolina Wilmington noticed dissolved oxygen plummeted as a result of swamp water and swine farm waste flooding. The lack of oxygen in the water caused widespread death of fish and critters living in the bottom of the rivers, not to mention all that sewage introduced bacteria and disease into the environment! Swamp water flooding may be a natural, unavoidable consequence of hurricanes, but we must have policies and practices in place to reduce further degrading water quality from human activities.
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Why coastal flood maps are wrong: the tale of compound hazards
Coastal flooding is expected to increase in frequency due to future sea level rise and more extreme weather, but most coastal flood hazards maps do not portray the increase risk. We dive deeper into how these maps are made and uncover why the current flood hazard maps may be misleading.
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