by Marie DeNoia Aronsohn, October 3, 2017 Historically, tropical cyclones (also known as hurricanes) have rarely hit Mumbai, India. But how will future storms impact this coastal city on the Arabian Sea? That’s the focus of a leading-edge study underway by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. “While several cyclones did […]
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Hurricane Harvey
Many Columbia University scientists and experts have published articles and have been quoted in numerous media reports on Hurricane Harvey and its disastrous impacts in Texas. We have put together a list of some of these articles and reports, and will be updating the list as more appear and we become aware of them. Written: […]
The Near-term Impacts of Climate Change on Investors
http://climateandlife.columbia.edu/2017/04/27/the-near-term-impacts-of-climate-change-on-investors/ On May 2, 2017, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School will co-host an invite-only conference on “The Near-term Impacts of Climate Change on Investors” in midtown Manhattan Peter de Menocal, director of Lamont-Doherty’s Center for Climate and Life and a co-organizer of the event, said the purpose of the conference […]
Willis Re: Thunderstorms Pose as Much Property Risk as Hurricanes
London, 20 March 2017 — Risk to U.S. property from thunderstorms is as high as from hurricanes, according to new research published by Willis Re, the reinsurance division of Willis Towers Watson (NASDAQ: WLTW), the global advisory, broking and solutions company. A report compiled with Columbia University, a member of the Willis Research Network (WRN), […]
Is the Oroville dam failure a climate change story?
In February, after torrential rains led to partial failure of a spillway on Northern California’s Oroville Dam, forcing evacuation of nearly 200,000 people downstream, Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh wrote an op-ed in The New York Times entitled “What California’s Dam Crisis Says About the Changing Climate.” My colleague, Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia […]
Can There be a Cure for Catastrophe?
On Thursday March 2nd 2017 the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate hosted Dr. Robert Muir-Wood, the head of research at Risk Management Solutions (RMS) and a world-leading “catastrophe scientist” who presented “The Cure for Catastrophe – how we can stop manufacturing natural disasters,” based on his book by the same title. Opening with a […]
Climate Risk and National Security: People not Polar Bears
On Thursday, September 22nd, the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate hosted its biggest seminar to date. To an audience of over 100 people, Dr. David Titley presented Climate Risk and National Security: People not Polar Bears. Titley, a retired Rear Admiral in the US Navy who is now a Professor of Practice in Meteorology […]
Severe convection and tropical cyclone risk: Collaborations between academia and industry
The Initiative held two events this spring which have been written up in documents now available online. Our Severe Convection and Climate Workshop, held on March 9-10, 2016, is described in detail in a report lead-authored by John Allen (formerly of IRI, now an Assistant Professor at Central Michigan University) for the Bulletin of the American […]
Lamont: Assessing Extreme Weather Risk
In Lamont’s 2015 Annual Report, an article by Stacy Morford summarizes some of the research on climate and extreme weather risk going on at Lamont.
Rapidly intensifying hurricanes and bunched-up tornadoes
Two recent papers in Nature Communications by Columbia researchers focus on properties that emerge when one analyzes the statistical distributions of two different types of severe storms – tropical cyclones and tornadoes. Both highlight the most extreme instances of these already extreme events, and find surprising behavior in both, though in quite different ways. The first paper, […]