Finding “Glocal” Solutions to Flooding Problems

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https://eos.org/articles/finding-glocal-solutions-to-flooding-problemsURL


Source: By Alka Tripathy-Lang, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: Scientists call for joint efforts to combine real-time global rainfall data with high-resolution local hydrology to better forecast floods. Type “flooding today” into your search engine. You will likely find at least one place battling rising waters somewhere in the world—Mozambique today, Yorkshire yesterday, Hawaii tomorrow. Floods occur when water encroaches on dry land, which can happen during hurricane-induced storm surges or when heavy precipitation (or snowmelt) has nowhere to go. ...“Weather patterns, which cause flooding, are happening at the global scale,” said Guy Schumann, a flood hydrologist with the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, “but impacts of floods are very localized.” Local effects include costs to the economy, displacement of populations, and loss of life. Schumann and a team of scientists led by Huan Wu, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, China, developed an innovative flood model linking global precipitation patterns with localized hydrology—where water goes once it finds land. Their work provided useful information to the Chinese Ministry for Emergency Management when record rainfall in 2020 posed an immediate threat—an event that eventually affected 40 million people, according to Wu’s team.... 

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