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New Orleans braces for Tropical Storm Lee
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – New Orleans, devastated by Hurricane Katrina six years ago, faced a new threat on Saturday from Tropical Storm Lee, which was set to challenge the city’s flood defenses with an onslaught of heavy rain.The storm was expected to bring up to 20 inches of rain to southeast Louisiana over the next few days, including to low-lying New Orleans, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
Lee’s tidal surge could spur coastal flooding in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama before drenching a large swath of the Southeast and Appalachian regions next week.
The slow-moving storm has bedeviled forecasters. Lee’s winds weakened on Saturday night as it Read more…
North Carolina Most At-Risk Against Rising Sea Levels
If one man could hold back the sea, North Carolina wouldn’t need to worry about rising ocean levels. Neither would New York, Boston or Miami. (Photo: Reuters Photographer/Reuters)The problem with reports about rising sea levels is that the damn thing—the world’s ocean—seems to creep up very, very slowly. In the past 21 centuries it’s raised an average of .07874 an inch every year, about the thickness of a nickel.
That doesn’t sound like much, right? Nothing to worry about! But what makes rising sea levels a deadly serious problem is that the ocean just keeps creeping up, up, up. And the average in recent decades is more like an inch a year.
In fact a new report from the National Academy of Sciences says the rate of Read more…
Rising Mississippi takes aim at Cajun country
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| Workers build a temporary levee in Krotz Springs, La., Thursday, May 12, 2011, in advance of possible flooding if the Morganza Spillway north of Baton Rouge is opened. Crews were rushing to build temporary levees to protect properties that have been built outside of the town’s permanent ring levee over the last few decades. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) |
BUTTE LAROSE, La. (AP) — In the latest agonizing decision along the swollen Mississippi River, federal engineers are close to opening a massive spillway that would protect Baton Rouge and New Orleans but flood hundreds of thousands of acres in Louisiana Cajun country.
With that threat looming, some 25,000 people in an area known for small farms, fish camps, crawfish and a drawling French dialect are hurriedly packing their things and worrying that their homes and way of life might soon be drowned.
People in this riverfront community gathered at their volunteer fire station to hear a man dressed in Army fatigues deliver an Read more…
UA climate research: Big stretch of US coast at risk of rising seas
If global temperatures continue to rise and polar ice continues to melt, 9 percent of the land in our coastal cities and towns will be beneath sea level by the end of the century, University of Arizona researchers say.
Climate researchers Jeremy Weiss and Jonathan Overpeck, along with Ben Strauss of Climate Central in Princeton, N.J., mapped the U.S. coastline, using elevations provided by the U.S. Geological Survey. They applied the most recent predictions of a sea level rise of 1 meter (3.28 feet) by 2100 to produce a map that predicts big trouble for 20 cities with more than 300,000 people and for 160 smaller municipalities.
Weiss is a senior researcher in geosciences. Overpeck is a professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences and co-director of the UA’s Institute of the Environment.
The report was published last week in Climatic Change Letters.
The biggest impact will be felt in low-lying, heavily populated places such as New Orleans, Miami Beach and Virginia Beach, the report says.
Subsequent centuries will bring even higher sea levels that could completely submerge Read more…
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