Research Papers

Understanding extreme storm surge events that threaten low-lying coastal communities is key to effective flood mitigation/adaptation measures. However, observational estimates are sparse and highly uncertain along most coastal regions with a lack of observational evidence about long-term underlying trends and their contribution to overall extreme sea-level changes.

Storm surge barriers, levees, and other coastal flood defense megaprojects are currently being proposed as strategies to protect several US cities against coastal storms and rising sea levels.

Estimates of changes in the frequency or height of contemporary extreme sea levels (ESLs) under various climate change scenarios are often used by climate and sea level scientists to help communicate the physical basis for societal concern regarding sea level rise.

The Paris agreement focused global climate mitigation policy on limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Consequently, projections of hazards and risk are increasingly framed in terms of global warming levels rather than emission scenarios.

Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. We develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and process models. We use this approach to construct spatially explicit, probabilistic, and empirically derived estimates of economic damage in the United States from climate change.

Climate change threatens the economy of the United States in myriad ways, including increased flooding and storm damage, altered crop yields, lost labor productivity, higher crime, reshaped public-health patterns, and strained energy systems, among many other effects. Combining the latest climate models, state-of-the-art econometric research on human responses to climate, and cutting-edge private-sector risk-assessment tools, Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus crafts a game-changing profile of the economic risks of climate change in the United States.

Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. We develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and process models. We use this approach to construct spatially explicit, probabilistic, and empirically derived estimates of economic damage in the United States from climate change.

Climate change threatens the economy of the United States in myriad ways, including increased flooding and storm damage, altered crop yields, lost labor productivity, higher crime, reshaped public-health patterns, and strained energy systems, among many other effects. Combining the latest climate models, state-of-the-art econometric research on human responses to climate, and cutting-edge private-sector risk-assessment tools, Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus crafts a game-changing profile of the economic risks of climate change in the United States.

Understanding extreme storm surge events that threaten low-lying coastal communities is key to effective flood mitigation/adaptation measures. However, observational estimates are sparse and highly uncertain along most coastal regions with a lack of observational evidence about long-term underlying trends and their contribution to overall extreme sea-level changes.

Estimates of changes in the frequency or height of contemporary extreme sea levels (ESLs) under various climate change scenarios are often used by climate and sea level scientists to help communicate the physical basis for societal concern regarding sea level rise.

The Paris agreement focused global climate mitigation policy on limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Consequently, projections of hazards and risk are increasingly framed in terms of global warming levels rather than emission scenarios.

SCOPE-ERA5 (Station-Calibrated Outputs for Planning & Engineering) is a post-processed version of ERA5 daily data at 7,115 global weather stations (1979-2024).  Both marginal distributions and inter-variable dependence are adjusted to produce physically consistent time series of temperature, humidity, surface pressure, and wind speed.

Quantitative assessment of climate change risk requires a method for constructing probabilistic time series of changes in physical climate parameters. Here, two such methods are developed and then are applied to construct joint probability density functions of temperature and precipitation change over the twenty-first century for every county in the United States.

We employ the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP),r egional climate model data to estimate changes in 10-meter wind speeds expected to occur in the mid-21st century at three wind farm regions: Altamont Pass, San Gorgonio Pass, and Tehachapi Pass. We examined trends in wind speed magnitude and frequency using three different global/regional model pairs, focused on model evaluation, seasonal cycle, and long-term trends.

Storm surge barriers, levees, and other coastal flood defense megaprojects are currently being proposed as strategies to protect several US cities against coastal storms and rising sea levels.

In this review, we highlight the role of interest mobilization, political leadership, stakeholder participation, and legal challenges as a result of environmental protection laws in both creating and overcoming political obstacles to the implementation of storm surge barriers, levees, and other coastal flood protection megaprojects.