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

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.

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