July 21, 2017

What happened this week?

United States. Remote landslide creates new, deep lake in national forest. JACKSON, Wyo. — A remote landslide has created a deep lake in western Wyoming ... Read more

Interesting Facts

Are we running out of fresh water? Global water demand is projected to increase by 55 per cent between 2000 and 2050 ... Read more

A huge iceberg weighing more than a trillion tonnes was recently released from western Antarctica. The UK based team of scientists says that a section of approximately 5,800 square kilometers is already lose ... Read more

“'When corals die off, we die off'”. In 1998, the cruel heat of El Nino hit Seychelles hard. Sea surface temperatures rose around the Indian Ocean, bleaching 90% of coral reefs in the archipelago. Widespread flooding caused significant economic losses -- fishing and agriculture accounting for more than half of the total figure according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ... Read more

Climate change is going to make air travel even more nightmarish, study says. Extreme heat is a byproduct of climate change. Experts agree that as the Earth’s temperature rises, these heatwaves will come more frequently, last longer, and be felt more intensely. And this will have an indelible effect on how we use airplanes for travel and commerce. A team of researchers at Columbia University set out to chart exactly how rising temperatures will affect the takeoff and landing performance of aircraft; their findings were published today in the journal Climatic Change ... Read more

Large Oklahoma earthquake shifted the earth by 3 centimeters, study says. The earth shifted by about 3 centimeters during the most powerful earthquake in recorded history in Oklahoma in September. The 5.8-magnitude earthquake near Pawnee tore apart houses in the rural area near the epicenter.... Read more

Extreme cyber-attack could dwarf natural disaster costs. A major global cyber-attack has the potential to trigger up to US$53 billion of economic losses – greater than some of Australia’s worst natural disasters combined ... Read more

3-D models help scientists gauge flood impact.  Today, simplified 2-D flood models are the state of the art for predicting flood wave propagation, or how floods spread across land. A team at IFC, led by UI Professor George Constantinescu, is creating 3-D non-hydrostatic flood models that can more accurately simulate flood wave propagation and account for the interaction between the flood wave and large obstacles such as dams or floodplain walls. These 3-D models also can be used to assess and improve the predictive capabilities of the 2-D models that government agencies and consulting companies use for predicting how floods will spread and the associated risks and hazards ... Read more

What's new in Disaster Risk Reduction?

Scientists want to use satellites to predict landslides. Small satellites have countless uses, including when it comes to monitoring the planet for natural disasters. Now, scientists think they've made a breakthrough on this front: They're using satellite data to map the Earth's movement. Their end goal is to develop an early warning system for communities before landslides, Engadget said ... Read more

Experimental Model Predicted Tornado's Path Hours, Not Minutes, Before it Formed. The strategy, called Warn on Forecast, allows forecasters to issue warnings before storms even form, based on high-resolution satellite imagery, radar data and surface observations. This data is fed into a very high-resolution weather model that is run every 15 minutes for a period of time on storms of interest or for areas that could produce storms ... Read more

Green Finance: The Key to Unlocking Sustainable Development. The world has, for some time now, been keenly aware of the challenges that poor environmental management poses to our common future – threatening human health, peaceful societies, and long-term economic sustainability ... Read more

Principles for Flood and Coastal Erosion. Office for Nuclear Regulation and Environment Agency Joint ... Read more

Climate change will force today’s kids to pay for costly carbon removal technologies, study says. The longer humans continue to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the closer we draw to leaving the next generation with an unmanageable climate problem, scientists say. A new study, just out Tuesday in the journal Earth System Dynamics, suggests that merely reducing greenhouse gas emissions may no longer be enough — and that special technology, aimed at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, may also be necessary to keep the Earth’s climate within safe limits for future generations ... Read more

Climate change and protected areas. Canada’s network of protected areas provide a natural solution for climate change by conserving biodiversity, protecting ecosystem services, connecting landscapes, capturing and storing carbon, building knowledge and understanding and inspiring people ... Read more