Doug Sheridan articulates
“Who could blame the public if—as appears is already happening—they simply stop listening?”
Doug Sheridan articulates
“Who could blame the public if—as appears is already happening—they simply stop listening?”
Recently, we wrote how the odds of a 100-year weather event occurring are materially higher than folks appreciate, mostly because of the large number of opportunities to register such events afforded by our vast network of measurement sites.
That's not the only reason, however. Media are also misinterpreting events, even as they work with errant or outdated data. For example, the 100-year benchmark as established by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) takes into account river and stream flooding but ignores breaches caused by factors like construction and drainage problems.
Between 1978 and 2008, almost half of Houston’s flooding fell outside of areas in the 100-year flood plain. Some parts of the city were submerged repeatedly during the 2015 to 2018 period—when it experienced three extreme flood events—while others avoided flooding altogether. That the 100-year flood zone designations were relatively poor predictors of where flooding occurred implies that variables other than meteorological conditions were at play.
Because the 100-year floodplain designation is a moving target, it may do little to prepare property owners for increased occurrence of flooding.
And it appears city planners are being caught off-guard by the frequency of such events as well. In their case, it's because the weather data used to come up with 1-in-100-year standards are outdated. In the time it takes the USGS to adopt new standards, weather patterns have changed.
NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration ’s precipitation data figure into the calcs that become atlases for flood management. Most states currently rely on Atlas 14, the most recent available for most of the continental US. The volume took 20 years to complete. Only Texas’ and Northeastern states’ projections have been updated within the past five years. Eleven states depend on Atlas 2, which includes some 50-year-old data.
In the meantime, the climate is changing, leading to more frequent events. A quick glance at NOAA’s precipitation data shows a much wetter present than the period from the 1960s-90s, the basis for some current benchmarks. That means today’s planners—and likely some insurers—are making mitigation decisions based on poor data. Charting heat and drought extremes, in the wake of a more moderate period going back to 1960, also renders an escalating curve over the past 30 years.
These lags expose a challenge for predicting and communicating weather extremes—that is, the historic data is simply too old and the length of data records too short to properly represent the effects of climate change.
Our Take: The deeper we dig into the data and "science" being used to "prove" that we're increasingly helpless in the face of Earth's changing climate, the more we find that our messengers simply don't know what they're talking about. Who could blame the public if—as appears is already happening—they simply stop listening?