Storm-weary New York City needs to adapt faster to climate change

Jim Hall in the Guardian (UK): ...In 2007 [New York City] embarked on a programme to address changing climate, population growth and ageing infrastructure, as well as improve residents’ quality of life. It covers investment in green infrastructure, including energy, transport and housing, up to 2030.

New York City has also been working to tackle the realities of flooding and offer solutions that keep the city moving in spite of its storms. After flooding in 2007 a weakness was identified with the subway network in Queens and other low-lying areas. Storm water had repeatedly gushed through street-level ventilation grates into the subway network below, flooding numerous stations throughout the borough and paralysing portions of the city’s transport network. Responding, the MTA raised the subway grates up off the ground and double-purposing them as street benches and other outdoor furniture. Not only does this enhance resilience to flooding, but enables residents to go about their lives even during heavy storms.

In response to Sandy and its devastation to the north east of the US, the federal government awarded $335m last year to the City of New York to build the first stage of what is being called “The Big U” project. Essentially a large storm protection berm around lower Manhattan, it will extend for 10 miles, and aims to protect an incredibly dense, vibrant and low-lying urban area. The proposed system will not only shield the city against floods and storm water, but also aims to provide social and environmental benefits to the community..

New York City’s approach to climate change adaptation was one of the first in the US that not only considered how one policy area affects another, but also how agencies can work together effectively.

However, despite its plans, our research at the Institution of Civil Engineers suggests that the city itself has built comparatively few resilience projects. It is important to get decisions right, so time spent on analysis and design is time well spent. But impending sea level rise, hurricanes and storms warrant action sooner rather than to later....

The Queens Midtown Tunnel flooded during Hurricane Sandy. Shot by the MTA, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

New York state snow emergency: five dead, 100+ trapped in monster winter storm

NBC News: Troopers in all-terrain vehicles set out Wednesday to reach drivers trapped in a ferocious winter storm that dumped 5 feet of snow outside Buffalo, New York — with plenty more on the way. More than 130 miles of Interstate 90, the main artery running east and west across New York state, remained closed, with no word when it would reopen. More than 100 cars were reported trapped on Tuesday night.

Authorities in Erie County, which includes Buffalo, reported a fifth death, a 46-year-old man found in a car. Four were reported Tuesday, one in a car crash and three from heart attacks, including two people who were shoveling snow.

The towns south of Buffalo were believed to be the hardest hit, but snow totals were hard to come by. The National Weather Service said some places could approach the record for a single-day snowfall in the United States, 6 feet 4 inches.

...Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency for 10 counties, and the National Guard was activated to help clean up. The state deployed 526 snowplows and 17 large snow blowers. The weather service warned that 3 to 8 more inches of snow could fall Wednesday, and up to 2 feet more by Thursday night outside Buffalo....

The early stages of a 2006 lake effect snow storm in Buffalo, New York, shot by Jason Safoutin, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 2.5 license 

New York must act now to alleviate flooding caused by climate change, AG says

Glenn Coin in Syracuse.com: New York has seen a "steep increase" in heavy rains and flooding due to climate change -- and must act now to avert future disasters, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said today in a new report.

"In recent years, there has been a steep increase in the number of powerful deluges," Schneiderman said in the 19-page report. "Extreme rainstorms, and the disastrous floods and soil erosion that result, are wreaking havoc in places that rarely had to contend with these damaging meteorological events."

Schneiderman calls upon the state to take several measures to reduce carbon dioxide and make the state more resilient to extreme weather. Schneiderman said extreme downpours are becoming more common. The report lists a number of recent rainfalls that caused flooding, including the 13.6 inches that fell on Long Island Aug. 13

"That deluge flooded out over 1,000 homes and businesses, opened massive sinkholes on area roadways, and forced hundreds to evacuate to safer ground," Schneiderman wrote. "Initial damage estimates already exceed $30 million."...

Traffic crossing a flooded section of NY 17K at the Muddy Kill just west of Montgomery, NY, USA, following Hurricane Irene. Shot by Daniel Case, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Odds of storm waters overflowing Manhattan seawall up 20-fold

A press release from the American Geophysical Union: Maximum water levels in New York harbor during major storms have risen by nearly two and a half feet since the mid-1800s, making the chances of water overtopping the Manhattan seawall now at least 20 times greater than they were 170 years ago, according to a new study. Whereas sea-level rise, which is occurring globally, has raised water levels along New York harbor by nearly a foot and a half since the mid-19th century, the research shows that the maximum height of the city’s “once-in-10-years” storm tide has grown additionally by almost a foot in that same period.

The newly recognized storm-tide increase means that New York is at risk of more frequent and extensive flooding than was expected due to sea-level rise alone, said Stefan Talke, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Portland State University in Portland, Ore. He is lead author of the new study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The research also confirms that the New York harbor storm tide produced by Hurricane Sandy was the largest since at least 1821.

Tide gauge data analyzed in the study show that a major, “10-year” storm hitting New York City today causes bigger storm tides and potentially more damage than the identical storm would have in the mid-1800s. Specifically, Talke explained, there’s a 10 percent chance today that, in any given year, a storm tide in New York harbor will reach a maximum height of nearly two meters (about six and a half feet), the so-called “10-year storm.” In the mid-19th century, however, that maximum height was about 1.7 meters (about 5.6 feet), or nearly a foot lower than it is today, according to tide gauge data going back to 1844, he noted.

“What we are finding is that the 10-year storm tide of your great-, great-grandparents is not the same as the 10-year storm tide of today,” Talke said.

... The study’s findings may indicate that “storm surges’ interaction with New York harbor has gotten larger so that in addition to sea level rise, the storm surges may have been enhanced,” said Chris Zervas, a scientist at NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services in Silver Spring, Md., who was not involved in the study. “For the latter part of the 1900s, [it shows] that the possibility of overtopping the seawall has increased quite a bit in addition” to sea-level rise, he added...

The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel (formerly known as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel) on Oct. 30, 2012, during Hurricane Sandy, shot by Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Flood insurance and risk subsidies on Long Island

Long Island Newsday: Nearly 60,000 policyholders in New York, including as many as 26,000 on Long Island, are among the 1.1 million nationwide who could see their federally subsidized flood insurance premiums rise as part of changes to the National Flood Insurance Program, according to a review of federal data by The Associated Press.

President Barack Obama on Friday signed into law a measure to delay steep increases from a 2012 overhaul that aimed to shore up the cash-strapped program by phasing out subsidies and requiring policyholders to begin paying risk-based rates immediately. While the law was widely hailed as a victory for people who had seen their bills triple, quadruple or even increase 15-fold overnight, pocketbook pain for many merely has been delayed.

...Long Islanders with subsidized government flood insurance still will be hit with steady rate increases, despite the law. While no one is sure yet how high rates will go, there is cause for worry in places such as Long Beach, Freeport, Babylon Town, Hempstead Town and elsewhere that rely on affordable policies to keep businesses afloat and prop up the local housing market.

For years, waterfront communities across the country have relied on insurance that was far cheaper than the risks warranted, and the federal government paid the difference. When Congress tried to stem the red ink by raising rates to reflect the real costs, people in the flood plains screamed -- and the politicians listened.

But at least 21,000 homeowners in Nassau and Suffolk counties still will be hit with rate increases of as much as 18 percent each year until the program is collecting enough revenue to cover a $24 billion shortfall created by the long-running discounts and a series of catastrophic storms. That includes 5,700 homeowners in the Town of Hempstead, 2,000 in the City of Long Beach and 1,500 in the Town of Oyster Bay....

Hurricane Sandy in Long Beach, New York, New York National Guard photo

New York's High Line hit by hardy cockroaches never before seen in US

Ian Sample in the Guardian (UK): The High Line, the New York park that turned a dilapidated stretch of elevated railway on Manhattan's West Side into one of the city's newest tourist attractions, may have attracted a different kind of visitor: a cockroach, never seen before in the US, that can withstand the harsh winter cold.

Insect biologists at Rutgers University in New Jersey said Periplaneta japonica was well-documented in Asia, but had never been confirmed in the US – until now. Jessica Ware and Dominic Evangelista, whose findings were published in the Journal of Economic Entomology, say it is too soon to predict the impact, but there is probably little cause for concern. "Because this species is very similar to cockroach species that already exist in the urban environment," Evangelista said, "they likely will compete with each other for space and for food." That competition, Ware said, would probably keep the population low.

But Michael Scharf, a professor of urban entomology at Purdue University, said the situation should be monitored. "To be truly invasive, a species has to move in and take over and out-compete a native species," he said. "There's no evidence of that, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about it."

The newcomer was first spotted in New York in 2012 by an exterminator working on the High Line. The scientists suspect the insect was a stowaway in the soil of the park's ornamental plants. "Many nurseries in the United States have some native plants and some imported plants," Ware said. "It's not a far stretch to picture that as the source."...

The High Line Park shot by InSapphoWeTrust, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

New York City's poor targeted by silent killer: heat

Thomson Reuters Foundation: In the East New York neighborhood of New York City’s Brooklyn, a new danger is poised to increase stress on the area’s disadvantaged population. That threat - nothing to do with the well-publicized problems of drugs, gangs or guns - is heat stroke, experts say.

“When it’s hot out, it gets really busy in here,” said Alexandra Grainger, an emergency room nurse at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, whose service area includes the low-income neighborhoods of East Harlem and Roosevelt Island, as well as Yorkville which has many older people.

“It’s sad because most of the people are either elderly and don't know how to deal with the heat, or are less fortunate and cannot afford an air conditioner. It's a silent killer because the warning signs aren’t obvious and most don’t realize they are sick until it’s too late,” the nurse added.

That goes for the most vulnerable residents of Brooklyn, where housing projects abut liquor stores, and children play against a backdrop of boarded-up shops, overgrown lots and drug deals.

The unemployment rates in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of East New York and Brownsville are the highest in the city, standing at around 20 percent, and a little over half of residents receive some form of social support. In the summer, air conditioning for many is limited to an open fire hydrant.

“Research has shown that poverty-stricken areas in New York City see a greater increase in morbidity than other areas during a heat wave,” said Pat Kinney, a researcher with the Consortium for Climate Risk in the Urban Northeast (CCRUN), part of the Earth Institute at New York City’s Columbia University....

A 1942 shot of the Kosciusko public swimming pool in Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn

New York City weather will get much more severe over next 3 decades

CBS News New York: If you thought Hurricane Sandy was bad, the mayor’s office says conditions are ripe for far worse weather around here: like heat waves, droughts and coastal flooding. The study that Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered on the city’s weather future predicts a grim scenario of more heat waves, more rain and wind and more coastal flooding that will affect increasing numbers of people. A panel of climate change experts compiled the study.

“When they’ve looked at what the potential storm surge from a so-called hundred-year flood could be, the height of that hundred-year flood could be five to six feet higher than Sandy in the out years, and maybe over six feet higher,” city Rebuilding and Resiliency director Seth Pinsky told reporters including WCBS 880′s Rich Lamb. “We’re likely to have more frequent heavy downpours and for those heavy downpours to be heavier.”

The city estimates that by the year 2050 there will be a 101 percent increase in the number of people affect by coastal flooding — from 398,000 in 2013 to 801,000 in 2050. Lost jobs will go up 59 percent from 271,000 this year to 434,000 in 2050.

“Our focus should not be on preparing for the next Sandy — in other words, preparing for a storm that is going to do precisely the same thing in precisely the same places, in precisely the same way as Sandy,” NYC Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway told CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer on Monday.

The city report predicts a significant increase in heat waves — three or more days with temperatures in the 90s, saying it could go from two a year to seven a year. “At the high end of their estimates, by the 2050s, New York could have as many 90-degree days as Birmingham, Alabama,” Pinsky said.

“It makes our infrastructure extremely vulnerable,” Holloway said. “It is clear that we’re going to need to make investments as a city, significant investments if we’re going to be protected over the long term.”...

Easter Sunday on Fifth Avenue in 1900

Heatwave deaths in New York city could rise by up to 22%, study shows

Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian (UK): New York city could experience up to 22% more deaths from extreme summertime heat in the coming decade under global warming, according to a study of the impact of climate trends. The higher deaths will be partially offset by a reduction in deaths due to the milder winters predicted in Manhattan.

Overall, however, the net effect of the new temperature norms under climate change would be to increase weather-related deaths in New York city by up to 6.2% a year by the 2020s, according to the scientists.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, predicted oppressive summer temperatures would exact an increasingly heavy toll on people living in metropolitan areas such as Manhattan in the coming decades. The numbers would not be significantly offset by milder winters, the study found, and deaths due to extreme temperatures would rise more dramatically in the later decades of this century.

Without bold action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, heatwave deaths in New York city could rise by as much as 91% on 1980s levels by the 2080s, according to the study's projections. The net loss of life would be as much as 31% on 1980s levels, the study said.

"This is the first real study of the seasonal trade-off of climate change," Patrick Kinney, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University and one of the authors of the study, said. Kinney added: "What our study suggests is that the heat effects of climate change dominate the winter warming benefits that might also come: climate change will cause more deaths through heat than it will prevent during winter."...

East Houston Street in Manhattan, shot by David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license

Take steps to minimize flood risk

An editorial in the Poughkeepsie Journal (New York): The mid-Hudson Valley has seen more than its share of flooding in recent years due to severe storms — and natural disasters like Superstorm Sandy have taken their toll on the region. It seems clear Congress is going to be pushed to approve more disaster relief in the future, but there is only going to be so much funding to go around.

The area is not without means — and ways — to combat these issues. But it has to plan smarter and be fully aware of the strategies and programs in place to help. Storm damage is controllable and containable to a degree. Smart planners, environmental groups and geologists have talked about these strategies for years — but it is incumbent on localities and, in some cases, the state and federal government to implement them. They include:

• Removing storm debris that can block creeks, streams and other waterways. Failing to do so could make the damage from the next storm worse; excess water needs a place to go, preferably to larger waterways and other places that can absorb runoff.
• Establishing stronger buffers along streams and wetlands. Development along these fragile bodies of water makes it difficult for them to handle the downpours that occur during big storms.
• Taking regional approaches to flood prevention. Simply put, water doesn’t care about political boundaries. Controlling flooding simply can’t be done on a town-by-town basis.
• Saving farmland and open space. Development will continue to occur, especially once the economy gets moving again. That is to be expected and should be embraced. But there has to be a balance by strategically saving lands that will do the most good to preserve farming and help mitigate flooding....

Alvan Fisher's 1853 painting, "Hudson River near West Point"

Big city slowly returns to bright lights after Sandy

Jonathan Allen in Reuters: Few thought it would take quite so long to fully restore the dimmed lights of the famed skyline of New York City's Financial District. At last, however, firms displaced by the flooding and power outages brought on by Superstorm Sandy seem ready to return downtown, if a little warier of the rivers and sea that surrounds them.

Water Street was more water than street when Sandy hit. Nearly three weeks later, many of the flooded office towers that line the street as it skirts the East River toward the harbor at Manhattan's southernmost tip remain closed.

Yellow caution tape still decks the doors to darkened, mucky lobbies. The usual crowds of suited office workers have vanished from the sidewalks, replaced by a handful of clean-up workers and security officers.

"It's definitely a hiccup in our revenue and a disruption of our ongoing business operations," said Lou Colasuonno, a senior managing director of FTI Strategic Communications, a PR firm specializing in crisis management...

New York City and the dangling crane on 57th Street, shot by JordanBalderas, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Lower Manhattan quiet as sandy shuts one-third of offices

Oshrat Carmiel and David M. Levitt in Bloomerg News reported on Manhattan's devastated financial district: ....damage from Hurricane Sandy is keeping properties empty more than a week after the storm struck. There are 445 office and residential properties in the area that the city determined may be uninhabitable even while they may have no structural damage. Almost 33 percent of the 101 million square feet (9.4 million square meters) of lower Manhattan office space was out of operation as of Nov. 7, according to brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.

Work crews continue to clean-up the wreck left behind by Atlantic superstorm Sandy. The sound of generators, garbage truck compactors, shuffling brooms and utility technicians are prominent sights and sounds throughout lower Manhattan.  “We have water in basically every building downtown,” said Joseph Moinian, who owns and manages more than 4 million square feet of commercial and residential space in the area. “I was always taught that salt water kills germs,” Moinian said. “Now I find out that it kills equipment too.”

The flooding in lower Manhattan after the biggest Atlantic storm in history is displacing workers at companies including American International Group Inc. (AIG) and Morgan Stanley (MS) as landlords drain basements, remove debris and repair electrical equipment. In the aftermath, commercial property values and leasing demand may fall while insurance premiums could rise.

“Lower Manhattan was just starting to come back to a very solid footing,” said Howard Lutnick, chairman and chief executive officer of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald LP. His firm is a tenant at 199 Water St., where a flooded basement will take six to eight weeks to clean up, he said. “This is going to have a material effect on values downtown,” said Lutnick, who also runs BGC Partners Inc., owner of property brokerage Newmark Grubb Knight Frank....

The South Ferry Subway station after Sandy, shot by Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Sandy teaches New York, US lessons learned on 9/11

Eric Roston in Bloomberg News: ...Superstorm Sandy delivers a message first heard on Sept. 11, 2001: New York, as a proxy for the United States, is unprepared for anticipated 21st century threats.  The storm is different. Sandy elicits no moral shock of war, no blinding national insult, "no unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury," as a columnist put it in Time magazine after 9/11. Instead we're up against something much more elusive, an enemy we're much more poorly equipped to deal with than sleeper terrorist cells: the Earth. 

"No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site," wrote Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert in a provocatively titled 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium."

We can describe the enemy's strategy. We know that the industrial emissions of heat-trapping gases are warming the Earth's atmosphere and changing climates. We know that heat melts ice, that heat makes water expand and evaporate, and that tropical cyclones like warm water and moist air. We know that we are facing the strange, strange possibility that the intersection of rivers, the mountain valleys, the islands off the coast of America, where humans have built sophisticated settlements over the past 10,000 years, might not be the best place for some of them toward the latter part of this century.

...Post Sandy, planners are in a tough spot, trying to bring the city back to speed as soon as possible, and to avoid locking in decisions that might have costly implications later.  "If you have to rebuild, instead of rebuilding what was there, how can you improve upon it?" asked John McDonald, director of technical strategy and policy development for General Electric's digital energy program. "The extremes we're experiencing are more extreme than what we've experienced before," he noted in the same phone interview, on Friday. "Storms are more severe. Flooding is more severe. When you look at the design of the city, you really have to take these things into account."

...Flood protection, subways, tunnels, bridges, aqueducts, electricity grids, food distribution, law enforcement, health and communications and the other infrastructure and human systems now need to be built not only to serve the needs of the present, but to anticipate and avoid the least tolerable risks we can surmise about the future....

Another photo of the boat on the tracks near Metro North's Ossining station, outside New York City. Shopt by Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

NYC Mayor Bloomberg says up to 40,000 may need relocation

CBS News: Shivering victims of Superstorm Sandy went to church Sunday to pray for deliverance as cold weather settling in across the New York metropolitan region — and another powerful storm forecast for the middle of the week — added to their misfortunes and deepened the gloom.

With overnight temperatures sinking into the 30s and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses still without electricity six days after Sandy howled through, people piled on layers of clothes, and New York City officials handed out blankets and urged victims to go to overnight shelters or daytime warming centers.

At the same time, government leaders began to grapple with a daunting longer-term problem: where to find housing for the tens of thousands of people whose homes could be uninhabitable for weeks or months because of a combination of storm damage and cold weather.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said 30,000 to 40,000 New Yorkers may need to be relocated — a monumental task in a city where housing is scarce and expensive — though he said that number would probably drop to 20,000 within a couple of weeks as power is restored in more places. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Sunday federal agencies are looking for apartments and hotel rooms for people displaced by Superstorm Sandy, Reuters reports....

East 5th Street between First and Second Avenues in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City during the seventh snowstorm of the 2010-2011 season. Shot by Beyond My Ken, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Sandy aftermath: Lights back up in New York, but fuel rationed

NDTV via AFP: The lights finally came back on in Manhattan on Saturday, but a severe shortage of gasoline continued to hamper efforts to get the New York area back on its feet after Hurricane Sandy. Power was restored to nearly all of Manhattan after flooding plunged the lower half of New York's most densely populated borough into darkness.

"By and large there is enough light and activity certainly to get a lot of people out into the street and get rid of that movie set look, as if we're in some sort of ghost town or horror movie," Bob McGee, a spokesman for utility company Con Edison, told NY1 television.

Crews were working to restore supplies both to schools that reopen on Monday and for polling places to be used in Tuesday's presidential election. Much of the rest of New York, however, continued to experience widespread power outages that could last for as long as another week.

As New Jersey police raised the state's death toll to 22, increasing the overall US total to at least 103, the biggest hurdle to recovery continued to be a severe lack of gasoline. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced rationing of fuel to curtail the long lines and growing frustration outside gas stations.

Starting Saturday, drivers with license plates ending in an even number will be allowed to fill up on even-numbered dates and those with number plates ending in odd numbers plates on odd-number dates....

The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel (formerly known as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel) on Oct. 30, 2012.  Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Years of warnings for New York City

David W. Chen and Mireya Navarro in CNBC via the New York Times:  For nearly a decade, scientists have told city and state officials that New York faces certain peril: rising sea levels, more frequent flooding and extreme weather patterns. The alarm bells grew louder after Tropical Storm Irene last year, when the city shut down its subway system and water rushed into the Rockaways and Lower Manhattan.

On Tuesday, as New Yorkers woke up to submerged neighborhoods and water-soaked electrical equipment, officials took their first tentative steps toward considering major infrastructure changes that could protect the city’s fragile shores and eight million residents from repeated disastrous damage. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the state should consider a levee system or storm surge barriers and face up to the inadequacy of the existing protections.

“The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations. We are only a few feet above sea level,” Mr. Cuomo said during a radio interview. “As soon as you breach the sides of Manhattan, you now have a whole infrastructure under the city that fills — the subway system, the foundations for buildings,” and the World Trade Center site.

The Cuomo administration plans talks with city and federal officials about how to proceed. The task could be daunting, given fiscal realities: storm surge barriers, the huge sea gates that some scientists say would be the best protection against floods, could cost as much as $10 billion.

But many experts say, given what happened with the latest storm, that inertia could be more expensive. After rising roughly an inch per decade in the last century, coastal waters in New York are expected to climb as fast as six inches per decade, or two feet by midcentury, according to a city-appointed scientific panel. That much more water means the city’s flood risk zones could expand in size.

"Look, the city is extremely vulnerable to damaging storm surges just for its geography, and climate change is increasing that risk," said Ben Strauss, director of the sea level rise program at the research group Climate Central in Princeton, N.J. “Three of the top 10 highest floods at the Battery since 1900 happened in the last two and a half years. If that’s not a wake-up call to take this seriously, I don’t know what is."...

The East River from Manhattan's East River Park swollen to its banks at 11:00 a.m., October 29, 2012. Shot by David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

New York prepares for the worst from Sandy

MarketWatch: New York prepared for the worst Sunday as two powerful storm systems, guided by Hurricane Sandy, headedtoward the nation’s most populous city, where heavy rain, strong winds and flooding were expected to hit as early as late Sunday. Mandatory evacuations were not in effect in New York, but the order could come on Sunday, when officials expect to have a better idea of where Sandy would strike. A decision on whether the city’s mass transit system would close will also come late Sunday.

“We’re planning for the worst; we’re hoping for the best and decisions on this will be made tomorrow,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Joseph Lhota told a Saturday news conference

Sandy weakened overnight into a tropical storm then strengthened again into hurricane with sustained winds of more than 75 miles an hour. Another system that often results in severe winter storms moved across the nation from the worst, and was expected to boast Sandy’s strength. The hybrid storm could impact as many as 50 million people, according to published reports.

In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a Saturday afternoon press conference the city would very likely feel Sandy’s effects for several days, with flooding and bridge closures to be expected. Bloomberg said the city was not requiring evacuations of low-lying areas especially at risk for flooding, saying officials should have a better idea of where Sandy would hit late Sunday afternoon or evening. “If it were to hit land in Baltimore or in Nantucket, New York would just have some heavy winds, and a little bit of flooding, and a lot of rain; if it were to hit closer to home, the flooding, the rain and the winds will all get much more problematic,” Bloomberg said....

The World Financial Center in Manhattan, built on landfill and vulnerable to flooding. Shot by Fanghong, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

New York City braces for climate change through panel and task force

Karen Frantz in the Queens Times Ledger: A panel and task force that first convened several years ago to identify ways the city can cope with the local impact of climate change, such as fiercer storms and rising sea levels, will now meet on a regular basis and have an expanded focus.

“Climate change is here and our city must be prepared to deal with this and to have a coordinated response,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) told a news conference at City Hall last week, lauding the passage of legislation institutionalizing the task force and panel.

The legislation, passed unanimously by the Council Aug. 22, is being hailed as the first of its kind among federal, state and local governments.

“It’s great for New York City to be the national leader in greenhouse gas reduction. It’s also great for us to be the leader in climate change adaptation,” Councilman James Gennaro (D-Fresh Meadows) said. Gennaro, head of the Council Committee on Environmental Protection, is the author of the legislation.

The New York City Panel on Climate Change, made up of scientific experts on climate change appointed by the mayor and modeled after the International Panel on Climate Change, will now make projections once every three years about the risks rising global temperatures pose to the city.

In addition, the New York City Climate Change Adaptation Task Force will make strategy recommendations for reducing climate change impacts on vulnerable populations, public heath, natural systems and the economy one year after the panel makes its projections....

Lower Manhattan from a helicopter, shot by nosha, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Sea-level rise poses expensive questions for New York City

John J. Fialka in E&E:  Mayor Michael Bloomberg has given his city one of the most detailed and highly publicized plans to reduce carbon emissions and to adapt to rising sea levels and other risks posed by climate change. He launched his program in 2007 and used it as a platform to vault into the chairmanship of C40, an international group of 40 big-city mayors determined to deal with the complex welter of climate issues they face. "Mayor Bloomberg is shaping the global dialogue and action on climate change in cities," boasts the latest version of New York City's plan, known as "PlaNYC."

....While Mitt Romney and other major Republicans sow doubts about climate issues and many Democrats -- including at times President Obama -- have soft-pedaled them, Bloomberg's plans appear to confront the difficulties of climate change head-on. "The scientific evidence is irrefutable," PlaNYC says. "Rising sea levels are extremely likely," says the New York City Panel on Climate Change, appointed to advise the city on carrying out the plan.

...But there is also a steep downside. Because New York City has more than 520 miles of coastline, it is among the top 10 port cities in the world that are most exposed to coastal flooding. Measured in terms of private property subject to damage from more potent storms and torrential rains that scientists predict are coming with climate change, the low-lying Big Apple ranks second in the world, with $2.3 trillion of property at risk, according to its own data.

One of the first victims of the flooding will likely be the same underground transit systems that make New York's carbon dioxide emissions so low. A recent report by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority warned that the combination of sea-level rise and the surging ocean currents that can accompany a powerful storm could flood many of the city's subway, highway and rail tunnels "in less than one hour."...

With climate change, today's '100-year floods' may happen every three to 20 years

Jennifer Chu in PhysOrg: Last August, Hurricane Irene spun through the Caribbean and parts of the eastern United States, leaving widespread wreckage in its wake. The Category 3 storm whipped up water levels, generating storm surges that swept over seawalls and flooded seaside and inland communities. Many hurricane analysts suggested, based on the wide extent of flooding, that Irene was a “100-year event”: a storm that only comes around once in a century.

However, researchers from MIT and Princeton University have found that with climate change, such storms could make landfall far more frequently, causing powerful, devastating storm surges every three to 20 years. The group simulated tens of thousands of storms under different climate conditions, finding that today’s “500-year floods” could, with climate change, occur once every 25 to 240 years. The researchers published their results in the current issue of Nature Climate Change.

MIT postdoc Ning Lin, lead author of the study, says knowing the frequency of storm surges may help urban and coastal planners design seawalls and other protective structures. “When you design your buildings or dams or structures on the coast, you have to know how high your seawall has to be,” Lin says. “You have to decide whether to build a seawall to prevent being flooded every 20 years.”

Lin collaborated with Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, as well as with Michael Oppenheimer and Erik Vanmarcke at Princeton. The group looked at the impact of climate change on storm surges, using New York City as a case study. To simulate present and future storm activity in the region, the researchers combined four climate models with a specific hurricane model. The combined models generated 45,000 synthetic storms within a 200-kilometer radius of Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan....

A view of the marina in Battery Park City, Manhattan, shot by David Moran, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license