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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, March 23, 2015 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Kerry Emanuel

"Storm and Surge Risk to Major Coastal Cities in a Changing Climate"

ABSTRACT -- Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy remind us that many of our coastal cities are vulnerable to hurricanes, and that much of the damage comes from surges that accompany the storms. But history is too short and imperfectly recorded to allow for a robust assessment of the existing risk, and rising sea levels and changing levels of storminess may render history a poor guide to the future anyway. In this talk, I will show how physics and computational science may be brought to bear on the problem of assessing hurricane risk to major coastal cities, with implications for improving urban resiliency.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Kerry Emanuel is the Cecil and Ida Green professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1981, after spending three years on the faculty of UCLA. Professor Emanuel's research interests focus on tropical meteorology and climate, with a specialty in hurricane physics. His interests also include cumulus convection, and advanced methods of sampling the atmosphere in aid of numerical weather prediction. He is the author or co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and two books, Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, published by Oxford University Press and aimed at a general audience, and What We Know about Climate Change, published by the MIT Press. He is a co-director of MIT's Lorenz Center, a climate think tank devoted to basic, curiosity-driven climate research.  The paper on which this Engineering Colloquium is based won a Science of Risk 2014 award from Lloyd's of London in the climate change category.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov