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8 December 2011
Breaking the hydro-illogical cycle
The news about drought is that – compared to other natural hazards like earthquakes and hurricanes – it doesn’t make the news that often. Droughts are the “Rodney Dangerfield of natural hazards,” said Don Wilhite of the University of Nebraska. “They get no respect.”
27 December 2010
Extreme natural hazards span the globe
I lived in Houston, but our town was dusted by a fine layer of Washington state, 3000 kilometers away after Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980. But that was really not that remarkable, according to a global database of explosive eruptions presented in FM10’s session on U13B. Similar studies reported throughout the conference–on volcanoes, landslides and tsunami–also assembled global databases of extreme geological hazards to better know when and where such threats might loom.
17 December 2010
Warning: Shaking, rattling, and rolling about to occur
Scientists in Japan have developed an earthquake warning system–and though it doesn’t predict earthquakes, it does provide several seconds of warning time. The warning interval varies, depending on the distance to the quake’s epicenter.
That early warning system, Kinkyu Jishin Sokuhou in Japanese, was the topic of a presentation by Kyoto University’s Jim Mori during Thursday afternoon’s session NH43B: Transmitting Hazard Science to End Users: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Needed? II.
14 December 2010
Lessons from a year of disasters
Meteorologist Julia Slingo spent her birthday recounting the lessons of what had to be one of the more eventful years of her life. Slingo, the Chief Scientist for the UK’s Meteorology (Met) Office spoke to a Monday evening audience at the Frontiers of Geophysics Lecture, session U15A-01.“I was just getting over Climate-gate,” she said, “when all of a sudden Eyjafjallajokull went up, and it’s impact was massive. That was the first of them.”
14 July 2010
Cities may be magnets for disaster
Between the recent oil spill and Hurricane Katrina, it might seem that New Orleans is a magnet for disasters. A new study suggests that could be true – researchers have found that coastal cities could actually attract hurricanes. Johnny Chan and Andie Au-Yeung of the City University of Hong Kong wanted to improve forecasts of where hurricanes, or tropical cyclones, will go as they approach land. This “track forecasting” is …
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