Hurricanes Florence and Michael in the U.S. and Super Typhoon Mangkhut in the Philippines have shown the widespread and harmful impact of weather extremes on both ecosystems and built communities, with flash floods causing more deaths, as well as property and agriculture losses than from any other severe weather-related hazards. These losses have been increasing over the past 50 years and have exceeded $30 billion per year in the past decade. Globally, almost one billion people now live in floodplains, raising their exposure to river flooding from extreme weather events and underscoring the urgency in understanding and predicting these events.
Hurricanes Florence and Michael in the U.S. and Super Typhoon Mangkhut in the Philippines have shown the widespread and harmful impact of weather extremes on both ecosystems and built communities, with flash floods causing more deaths, as well as property and agriculture losses than from any other severe weather-related hazards. These losses have been increasing over the past 50 years and have exceeded $30 billion per year in the past decade. Globally, almost one billion people now live in floodplains, raising their exposure to river flooding from extreme weather events and underscoring the urgency in understanding and predicting these events.
Columbia Engineering researchers have demonstrated for the first time that runoff extremes have been dramatically increasing in response to climate and human-induced changes. Their findings, published today in Nature Communications, show a large increase in both precipitation and runoff extremes driven by both human activity and climate change. The team, led by Pierre Gentine, associate professor of earth and environmental engineering and affiliated with the Earth Institute, also found that storm runoff has a stronger response than precipitation to human-induced changes (climate change, land-use land-cover changes, etc). This suggests that projected responses of storm runoff extremes to climate and anthropogenic changes are going to increase dramatically, posing large threats to the ecosystem, affecting community resilience and infrastructure systems.
Read more at Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science
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