Engineering Commons^™

Wildfires Force Thousands To Evacuate Near Los Angeles: Here’S How The 2020 Western Fire Season Got So Extreme, Mojtaba Sadegh, Ata Akbari Asanjan, Mohammad Reza Alizadeh

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Two wildfires erupted on the outskirts of cities near Los Angeles, forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate their homes Monday as powerful Santa Ana winds swept the flames through dry grasses and brush. With strong winds and extremely low humidity, large parts of California were under red flag warnings.

High fire risk days have been common this year as the 2020 wildfire season shatters records across the West.

More than 4 million acres have burned in California – 4% of the state’s land area and more than double the previous annual record. Five of the state’s six largest historical …

Non-Conventional Vehicles As A Way Towards Carbon Neutrality In Iceland, Julia Sokolowska

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Paris Agreement’s chief objective is to protect the Earth and its inhabitants from a point of no return, when the effects of climate change will be so intense that they will shift the equilibrium of ecosystems. The distinctiveness of this international environmental treaty is that it does not impose climate change mitigation measures, but rather allows nation states to create their own set of measures, the NDCs, to reach the global warming of ‘well below 2oC’ by the end of the century. Thus, Iceland has submitted its own NDC, the Climate Action Plan 2018-2030, which has an ambitious goal of …

U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emission Bottlenecks: Prioritization Of Targets For Climate Liability, Alexis Pascaris, Joshua M. Pearce

Michigan Tech Publications

Due to market failures that allow uncompensated negative externalities from burning fossil fuels, there has been a growing call for climate change-related litigation targeting polluting companies. To determine the most intensive carbon dioxide (CO₂)-emitting facilities in order prioritize liability for climate lawsuits, and risk mitigation strategies for identified companies as well as their insurers and investors, two methods are compared: (1) the conventional point-source method and (2) the proposed bottleneck method, which considers all emissions that a facility enables rather than only what it emits. Results indicate that the top ten CO₂ emission bottlenecks in the U.S. …

Changes In The Exposure Of California’S Levee-Protected Critical Infrastructure To Flooding Hazard In A Warming Climate, Iman Mallakpour, Mojtaba Sadegh, Amir Aghakouchak

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Levee systems are an important part of California's water infrastructure, engineered to provide resilience against flooding and reduce flood losses. The growth in California is partly associated with costly infrastructure developments that led to population expansion in the levee protected areas. Therefore, potential changes in the flood hazard could have significant socioeconomic consequences over levee protected areas, especially in the face of a changing climate. In this study, we examine the possible impacts of a warming climate on flood hazard over levee protected land in California. We use gridded maximum daily runoff from global circulation models (GCMs) that represent a …