Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Compound Risk Of Heat And Covid-19 In New York City: Riskscapes, Physical And Social Factors, And Interventions, Janelle Knox-Hayes, Juan Camilo Osorio, Natasha Stamler, Maria Dombrov, Rose Winer, Mary Hannah Smith, Reginald Blake, Cynthia Rosenzweig

Publications and Research

Climate change is disrupting the fundamental conditions of human life and exacerbating existing inequity by placing further burdens on communities that are already vulnerable. Risk exposure varies by where people live and work. In this article, we examine the spatial overlap of the compound risks of COVID-19 and extreme heat in New York City. We assess the relationship between socio-demographic and natural, built and social environmental characteristics, and the spatial correspondence of COVID-19 daily case rates across three pandemic waves. We use these data to create a compound risk index combining heat, COVID-19, density and social vulnerability. Our findings demonstrate …

Toward Informatics-Enabled Preparedness For Natural Hazards To Minimize Health Impacts Of Climate Change, Jimmy Phuong, Naomi O. Riches, Luca Calzoni, Gora Datta, Deborah Duran, Asiyah Yu Lin, Ramesh P. Singh, Anthony E. Solomonides, Noreen Y. Whysel, Ramakanth Kavuluru

Publications and Research

Natural hazards (NHs) associated with climate change have been increasing in frequency and intensity. These acute events impact humans both directly and through their effects on social and environmental determinants of health. Rather than relying on a fully reactive incident response disposition, it is crucial to ramp up preparedness initiatives for worsening case scenarios. In this perspective, we review the landscape of NH effects for human health and explore the potential of health informatics to address associated challenges, specifically from a preparedness angle. We outline important components in a health informatics agenda for hazard preparedness involving hazard-disease associations, social determinants …

Geology Online Lab Activities An Open Educational Resource For Community College Students And Instructors, Rondi Davies

Open Educational Resources

The online geology lab for community college students was developed by Dr. Rondi Davies, a faculty member at Queensborough Community College, City University New York, during two years of forced online synchronous learning brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This open educational resource collects many of Dr. Davies’ favorite open-access materials and supplements them with her own work within a single, cohesive laboratory manual intended for two-year, non-major college students from the New York area.

Dr. Davies wanted to develop labs that were fun, engaging, and that excited students about the subject, were relevant to their lives, helped them to …

A Call For The Library Community To Deploy Best Practices Toward A Database For Biocultural Knowledge Relating To Climate Change, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Abstract

Purpose – In this paper, a call to the library and information science community to support documentation and conservation of cultural and biocultural heritage has been presented.

Design/methodology/approach – Based in existing Literature, this proposal is generative and descriptive— rather than prescriptive—regarding precisely how libraries should collaborate to employ technical and ethical best practices to provide access to vital data, research and cultural narratives relating to climate.

Findings – COVID-19 and climate destruction signal urgent global challenges. Library best practices are positioned to respond to climate change. Literature indicates how libraries preserve, share and cross-link cultural and scientific knowledge. …

Development Of Predictive Models For Water Budget Simulations Of Closed-Basin Lakes: Case Studies Of Lakes Azuei And Enriquillo On The Island Of Hispaniola, Mahrokh Moknatian, Michael Piasecki

Publications and Research

The historical water level fluctuations of the two neighboring Caribbean lakes of Azuei (LA) and Enriquillo (LE) on Hispaniola have shown random periods of synchronous and asynchronous behaviors, with both lakes exhibiting independent dynamics despite being exposed to the same climatic forces and being directly next to each other. This paper examines their systems' main drivers and constraints, which are used to develop numerical models for these two lakes. The water balance approach was employed to conceptually model the lakes on an interannual scale and examine the assumptions of surface and subsurface processes. These assumptions were made based on field …

Quo Vadis Lakes Azuei And Enriquillo: A Future Outlook For Two Of The Caribbean Basin's Largest Lakes, Mahrokh Moknatian, Michael Piasecki

Publications and Research

Lakes Azuei (LA) and Enriquillo (LE) on Hispaniola Island started expanding in 2005 and continued to do so until 2016. After inundating large swaths of arable land, submerging a small community, and threatening to swallow a significant trade route between the Dominican Republic and Haiti; worries persisted at how far this seemingly unstoppable expansion would go. The paper outlines the approach to a look forward to answer this question vis-à-vis climate change scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It uses numerical representations of the two lakes, and it examines how the lakes might evolve, deploying three …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Perspectives Of Global Warming, Diomaris Padilla Dr.

Open Educational Resources

This course is designed to foster an interest in global environmental issues by informing the student of both the anthropogenic and natural causes for climate change. While focusing on the scientific aspects of climate change, a broader study will include issues pertaining to global policy and economics in order to engage the student in public policy debates.

Social Science Perspectives On Drivers Of And Responses To Global, Andrew K. Jorgenson, Shirley Fiske, Klaus Hubacek, Jia Li, Tom Mcgovern, Torben Rick, Juliet B. Schor, William Solecki, Richard York, Ariela Zycherman

Publications and Research

This article provides a review of recent anthropological, archeological, geographical, and sociological research on anthropogenic drivers of climate change, with a particular focus on drivers of carbon emissions, mitigation and adaptation. The four disciplines emphasize cultural, economic, geographic, historical, political, and social‐structural factors to be important drivers of and responses to climate change. Each of these disciplines has unique perspectives and makes noteworthy contributions to our shared understanding of anthropogenic drivers, but they also complement one another and contribute to integrated, multidisciplinary frameworks. The article begins with discussions of research on temporal dimensions of human drivers of carbon emissions, highlighting …

Impact Of Heatwave On A Megacity: An Observational Analysis Of New York City During July 2016, Prathap Ramamurthy, Jorge Gonzalez, Luis E. Ortiz, Mark Arend, Fred Moshary

Publications and Research

More than half of the world's current population resides in urban areas, and cities account for roughly three-quarters of the total greenhouse gas emissions. Current and future trends in urbanization will have significant impacts on global climate. However, our collective understanding of the climate of urban areas remains deficient, which is mainly related to significant knowledge gaps in observations. The New York City Summer Heat Campaign was initiated to address some of these critical knowledge gaps. As part of the campaign the urban boundary layer over New York City was continuously monitored during July 2016, a period that witnessed three …

Ensemble Forecasts: Probabilistic Seasonal Forecasts Based On A Model Ensemble, Hannah Aizenman, Michael D. Grossberg, Nir Y. Krakauer, Irina Gladkova

Publications and Research

Ensembles of general circulation model (GCM) integrations yield predictions for meteorological conditions in future months. Such predictions have implicit uncertainty resulting from model structure, parameter uncertainty, and fundamental randomness in the physical system. In this work, we build probabilistic models for long-term forecasts that include the GCM ensemble values as inputs but incorporate statistical correction of GCM biases and different treatments of uncertainty. Specifically, we present, and evaluate against observations, several versions of a probabilistic forecast for gridded air temperature 1 month ahead based on ensemble members of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System Version 2 …

Adolescent Girls, Human Rights And The Expanding Climate Emergency, Holly G. Atkinson, Judith Bruce

Publications and Research

Many adolescent girls—the poorest girls in the poorest communities—already live in an “emergency.” Humanitarian crises only amplify the call on their coping and caring capacities, while exacerbating their vulnerabilities. The frequency and intensity of emergencies, including natural disasters, conflicts, and infectious disease outbreaks such as Ebola, appear to be growing.¹ These emergencies threaten entire communities and whole countries, often with global implications. Many become virtually permanent. The authors urge key actors responding to both the threats and opportunities that climate change poses to understand adolescent girls as exceptionally at risk on the one hand, and as exceptionally resilient and …

Statement And Action Agenda From The Girls In Emergencies Collaborative, Omar Robles, Judith Bruce, Holly G. Atkinson, Dale Buscher, Karen Scriven, Kristin Kim Bart, Shelby French, Judithe Registre, Audrey Anderson

Publications and Research

Many adolescent girls—the poorest girls in the poorest communities—already live in an “emergency.” Humanitarian crises only amplify the call on their coping and caring capacities, while exacerbating their vulnerabilities. The frequency and intensity of emergencies, including natural disasters, conflicts, and infectious disease outbreaks such as Ebola, appear to be growing. These emergencies threaten entire communities and whole countries, often with global implications. Many become virtually permanent.

Up-To-Date Probabilistic Temperature Climatologies, Nir Krakauer, Naresh Devineni

Publications and Research

With ongoing global warming, climatologies based on average past temperatures are increasingly recognized as imperfect guides for current conditions, yet there is no consensus on alternatives. Here, we compare several approaches to deriving updated expected values of monthly mean temperatures, including moving average, exponentially weighted moving average, and piecewise linear regression. We go beyond most previous work by presenting updated climate normals as probability distributions rather than only point estimates, enabling estimation of the changing likelihood of hot and cold extremes. We show that there is a trade-off between bias and variance in these approaches, but that bias can be …

Rainfall Variability Analysis In The Nira River Basin Using Multi-Model Gcm Ensemble, Asmita Ramkrishna Murumkar, Dhyan Singh Arya

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Observed daily rainfall data during baseline period i.e. 1961-1990 of four raingauge stations namely Akluj, Baramati, Bhor and Malsiras located in the Nira River basin in Central India were analyzed to study the impact of climate change on rainfall. LARS-WG incorporating 15 GCM’s from the CMIP3 predictions for A1B, A2 and B1 emission scenarios was used to statistically downscale the daily rainfall data during three time spans centred at 2020’s, 2055’s and 2090’s. Uncertainty in GCMs rainfall predictions was analyzed on monthly, seasonal and annual scales. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Student’s t-test, and Fisher test have shown average to good performance during …

The Effect Of Flood Reduction And Water Conservation Of Decentralized Rainwater Management System, Dong Geun Kwak, Moo Young Han

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Climate change and increase of surface runoff by urbanization caused the urban flooding. Therefore, a sustainable new paradigm is required to recover sound water circulation and overcome the limitations of the existing water management system vulnerable to flooding. Recently Rainwater management is widely known and its legal obligation is strengthened to improve the control capacity for flooding reduction and water conservation in urban areas. Multipurpose DRMS(Decentralized Rainwater Management System) is a new paradigm proposed and recommended by NEMA(National Emergency Management Agency) for both flood control and water conservation. In this study, a flood prone area in Suwon of South Korea …

A Spatial-Temporal Downscaling Approach To Construction Of Rainfall Intensity-Duration-Frequency Relations In The Context Of Climate Change, Van-Thanh-Van Nguyen, Myeong-Ho Yeo

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

This paper proposes a spatial-temporal downscaling approach to construction of the intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) relations at a local site in the context of climate change and variability. More specifically, the proposed approach is based on a combination of a spatial downscaling method to link large-scale climate variables given by General Circulation Model (GCM) simulations with daily extreme precipitations at a site and a temporal downscaling procedure to describe the relationships between daily and sub-daily extreme precipitations based on the scaling General Extreme Value (GEV) distribution. The feasibility and accuracy of the suggested method were assessed using rainfall data available at eight …

The Application Of A Dynamic Openmi Coupling Between A Regional Climate Model And A Distributed Surface Water-Groundwater Model, Michael Brian Butts, Martin Drews, Morten Andreas Dahl Larsen, Sara Lerer, Søren Højmark Rasmussen, Jesper Grooss, Jesper Overgaard, Jens Christian Refsgaard

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The understanding of interactions between the atmosphere, the land surface and the subsurface hydrology plays a key role in ensuring sustainable development of water resources and terrestrial ecosystems. The evaluation of climate adaptation measures requires the ability to reliably simulate the impact of different anthropogenic effects such as changes in land use, interventions such as reservoirs for flood control and irrigation, conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater under projections of future climatic conditions and variability. The interaction between climate and groundwater are often neglected in climate models and climate assessment and few studies have investigated how groundwater systems will …

Economical And Systematical Evaluation On Rainfall Harvesting System (Case Study : Rainfall Harvesting System Designed In Taebaek City, Republic Of Korea), Seungkwon Jung, Changdeok Jang, Jiwon Jung, Hosun Lee, Yonghyeon Gwon

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Recently, climate change has caused drought to become more frequent and is becoming one of the serious natural disasters, resulting damages in infrastructure facilities, economy and private property losses etc. Taebaek city of Gangwon-do lies in the northeast Korean Peninsula along the steep mountain slopes, all the way to the sea. Thu, this city exhibit the Marine Climatic Characteristics. During the past 10 years, the average rainfall of Taebaek city is 849.9mm/year, which is less than the average rainfall for the whole country (1,274mm/year). This research is still ongoing. The next assessment will be on the construction cost of rainfall …

Hydrological Impacts Of Climate Change – Challenges, Uncertainty And Limitations, Shreedhar Maskey, Yurong Hu, Anshul Agarwal, Dinesh Bhatt

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

How climate change impacts water resources in the future is an important question that all hydrologists want to have an answer. Climate prediction scenarios are available from many Global Circulation Models for the 21st century. These prediction datasets are typically used as input to a hydrological model for simulating impacts on hydrology, particularly river runoff, evaporation, and storage changes. Because hydrological models are usually run on a much smaller resolutions than climate models, the climate prediction datasets are usually downscaled to represent local climate for using in a hydrological model. The uncertainty in the GCMs, downscaling and hydrological models makes …

Investigating The Sources Of Fresh Water Affecting The Hydrological Balance Of Lakes Enriquillo And Azuei (Hispaniola) – Data Analysis, Daniel Comarazamy, Jorge Gonzalez, Fred Moshary, Michael Piasecki, Mahrokh Moknatian, John Ibsen

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The Enriquillo and Azuei are saltwater lakes located in a closed water basin in the southwestern region of the island of La Hispaniola, these have been experiencing dramatic changes in total lake-surface area coverage during the period 1980-2012. The size of Lake Enriquillo presented a surface area of approximately 276 km2 in 1984, gradually decreasing to 172 km2 in 1996. The surface area of the lake reached its lowest point in the satellite observation record in 2004, at 165 km2. Then the recent growth of the lake began reaching its 1984 size by 2006. Based on surface area measurement for …

Development Of Climate Change Information Database And Its Use In Civic Consciousness Enlightenment, Motohiro Honma, Yuri Michihiro, Yasushi Suzuki, Yoshinobu Sato

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

GCM outputs such as CMIP3 are available via network access to PCMDI web site. Meteorological researchers are familiar with the usage of the GCM data, but the most of researchers other than meteorology such as agriculture, civil engineering, etc., and general people are not familiar with the GCM. There are some difficulties to use GCM; 1) to download the enormous quantity of data, 2) to understand the GCM methodology, parameters and grids. In order to provide a quick access way to GCM, Climate Change Information Database has been developed. The purpose of the database is to bridge the users and …

Evaluation Of Decision Making Methods For Integrated Water Resource Management Under Uncertainty, Thomas Peter Roach, Zoran Kapelan, Michelle Ledbetter, Ben Gouldby, Steven Wade, Ralph Ledbetter

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Water companies and utilities in the UK are required to produce Water Resource Management Plans (WRMPs) every five years that outline their future strategies for maintaining a secure water supply to meet anticipated demand levels. Regulatory frameworks differ around the world but in most countries similar plans are developed under the auspices of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) programmes. The plans justify new demand management and water supply infrastructure needed and validate management decisions. One of the greatest problems now facing decision makers in the water industry are the increasing uncertainties in the variables used in estimating the supply and …

Predicting The Impact Of Climate Change On Pipe Failure In Drinking Water Distribution Systems., Bas Wols, Peter Van Thienen

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Underground water infrastructure is designed to withstand a variability of forces during its lifetime before failure occurs. As a result of variations in loads on and deterioration of the pipe, early failures may occur. Climate change may accelerate or decelerate these processes. A statistical analysis is therefore performed to study correlations between weather parameters and pipe failure rates in the drinking water distribution systems (DWDS) of the Netherlands. The strongest correlations were found between pipe failure rates and temperature. Failure rates in asbestos cement (AC) and small diameter steel pipes increase during warm periods, which often also show higher water …

Evaluating Climate Change Scenarios For Regional Hydrological Management In Mountainous Semi-Arid Environments, Agustín Millares, Javier Herrero, Cristina Aguilar, María José Polo

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Snow processes play a relevant role in semi-arid mountainous basins where snowmelt dynamics conditions the availability of water resources. In such environments, many rivers flow during the dry season due to the water storage in the snow cover while heavy rainfall events sporadically trigger severe flood events. These particularities confer to these areas special interest due to their high sensitivity in the hydrological response against changes in the meteorological conditions. This issue could be critical in many regions of the world linked to semi-arid mountain areas (e.g., the Atlas Mountains, Andean Cordillera,…) and presents a real challenge for future modifications …

Are Climate Model Simulations Useful For Forecasting Precipitation Trends? Hindcast And Synthetic-Data Experiments, Nir Y. Krakauer, Balázs M. Fekete

Publications and Research

Water scientists and managers currently face the question of whether trends in climate variables that affect water supplies and hazards can be anticipated. We investigate to what extent climate model simulations may provide accurate forecasts of future hydrologic nonstationarity in the form of changes in precipitation amount. We compare gridded station observations (GPCC Full Data Product, 1901–2010) and climate model outputs (CMIP5 Historical and RCP8.5 simulations, 1901–2100) in real and syntheticdata hindcast experiments. The hindcast experiments show that imputing precipitation trends based on the climate model mean reduced the root mean square error of precipitation trend estimates for 1961–2010 by …

A Nonparametric Method For Separating Photosynthesis And Respiration Components In Co2 Flux Measurements, Chuixiang Yi, Runze Li, Peter S. Backwin, Ankur Desai, Daniel M. Ricciuto, Sean P. Burns, Andrew A. Turnipseed, Steven C. Wofsy, J. William Munger, Kell Wilson, Russell K. Monson

Publications and Research

Future climate change is expected to affect ecosystem-atmosphere CO₂ exchange, particularly through the influence of temperature. To date, however, few studies have shown that differences in the response of net ecosystem CO₂ exchange (NEE) to temperature among ecosystems can be explained by differences in the photosynthetic and respiratory processes that compose NEE. Using a new nonparametric statistical model, we analyzed data from four forest ecosystems. We observed that differences among forests in their ability to assimilate CO₂ as a function of temperature were attributable to consistent differences in the temperature dependence of photosynthesis and respiration. This observation …