Hot in New York, hotter in Jersey: Global warming is an abstraction; people want to know how warm their own cities or counties will get. That’s key to everything from agriculture to emergency planning. Global models typically provide estimates at a resolution of 150 kilometers. A regional model run inside a global one, however, can account for local topographical effects. The image above was produced by one such model: it shows average summertime surface temperatures in the 2050s, across counties in the New York metropolitan area. Knowing that it might be hotter in Manhattan than in the outer boroughs, and hotter still in parts of New Jersey, is vital for estimating, for example, the scale of health crises brought on by heat waves and ozone.
Credit: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
As the global picture grows grimmer, states and cities are searching for the fine-scale predictions they need to prepare for emergencies--and to keep the faucets running.
On December 11, 1992, a powerful northeaster coalesced off the eastern seaboard of the United States, and an eight-foot storm surge struck New York City. Seawater swamped the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to a depth of six feet, cascaded down PATH subway stairs in Hoboken, NJ, and forced LaGuardia Airport and many roads and subways lines to close. Had the storm been slightly stronger, a 10-foot surge could have devastated a far wider region, inundating low-lying areas like Coney Island and Manhattan's financial district and overwhelming the 14 sewage plants dotting the New York City coastline.
A flood of comparable height in New York City's environs should occur about once every 100 years, on average, in the estimation of one Columbia University study. But global warming and rising sea levels--as well as the possibility of more-intense precipitation, stronger storms, and altered storm trajectories--will make such disasters more frequent. And to protect the people who live and work where disaster threatens, the critical first step is to determine how quickly and by how much, exactly, the threat is increasing. That knowledge is essential to deciding how seriously to consider specific countermeasures; for New York, these could range from mandatory evacuation plans for seaside neighborhoods to multibillion-dollar storm-surge barriers spanning the Verrazano Narrows and other key channels.
To read the entire article you must log in:
Most of our content — all daily news, blogs, and videos — is free. Magazine stories are paid. To read this story, you must have a subscription or you must use a reading credit. Registration to Technology Review is free and entitles registrants to three free reading credits.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed