 Thank you everybody. And I'd like to thank both Antonio and Megan for those very, very gracious remarks. Sometimes you sit there and you wonder, who are they talking about? But it's great to actually be able to share a lot of the insights and knowledge that I've gained over the years. And I'd like to thank everybody who is here today, everybody who could not be here and extended that to me. And a special thanks go out to both my state and federal partners, some of whom are actually here today. So before we get into the actual science and serious part of things, let me just clear one thing up. I am not responsible for the snow outside. Okay? Good. We got that out of the way. But since everybody was talking about it on the way across, I just could not resist putting up this wind map, which some of you may or may not have seen. And what it does is it shows you the wind flow patterns. And so this is a storm that we've been hearing about that sort of shutting down a lot of the travel across the East Coast right now. So wind map, all you have to do is kind of Google that and you will find it. And there will be bucket loads of fun, I guarantee you. Okay. So let's transition then into some of the things that I wanted to share with you. And we're going to talk a little bit about three different types of hurricanes and tropical storms. And I'm going to do this from the hazards lens because that's a lot of what my training is. That's what I'm actually teaching this semester. So my students, I told them, don't bother to come. You're going to get this on Thursday anyway. But it sort of sets the frame for me in looking at it and looking at how do you take science and bring it into policy? How do you take it and make it accessible? So hopefully I'll be able to do that for the next few minutes or so. So the three systems that we're going to go back and think a little bit about from our climate justice perspective but also from a vulnerability perspective are of course Katrina, Irene and Sandy, each having a significant impact not just on the U.S. but across the Caribbean as well. And some of the lessons that we've learned from each one of those events in particular. So let's spend the next couple of minutes doing a sort of hurricanes 101. Just set the stage for all the same playing field here. When we talk about hazards, we're looking at different types of systems that occur naturally in the whole climate system that affect us pretty much day-to-day like snowstorms right now or hurricanes or ice storms and so on. But it's our exposure to those different types of hazards that then sets up the possibility for a disaster to occur. So when there's significant loss of life or limb, then we go from just a regular hazard, a regular nuisance hazard like a snowstorm to something that actually causes unfortunate loss of life and that's when it becomes a disaster. So each one of the three that we're going to look at was a disaster in question. And when disasters are severe enough, we have the capability, the governor's of each state has the capability to actually request federal assistance through the disaster declaration program. And when you take a look at it, here's Vermont up in here. And there are a couple counties like Caledonia and Orleans that have had at least 20 of those presidential disaster declarations since 1964 sort of putting them on par with other counties in Central Florida and across the Gulf Coast as well. So you're probably wondering why that is and of course a lot of it has to do with floods. So hazards in and of themselves, we think of them maybe as a one-body type of thing. So a hurricane is one hazard. But a lot of the sort of coincident parts of the hazard are the things that we need to pay attention to. So for example, did you know that hurricanes can spawn tornadoes? This is where the audience participation comes in. Okay? All right. So some people knew that hurricanes can spawn tornadoes and by the time you leave here, you will know that because hurricanes are, you know, circular systems are spinning like this. And so, you know, part of the conservation of momentum means that as it becomes smaller, there's a chance for part of that to sort of transition to our tornado. Now, most of the time you think about hurricanes, you think about things like a tremendous amount of rainfall. If you're inland like we are, the loss of life due to inland flooding is the other big piece that we can look at. And if you're on the coast, it's the storm surge and the wind-driven waves that are of particular importance to us. So there are all of these associated hazards in addition to the hurricane itself that's critically important. Now, I grew up in Trinidad, which is in the Caribbean, and every Caribbean child knows the following saying, June to soon, July, standby, August, come it must, September, remember, October, all over, which essentially tells you the length of the hurricane season. So you've grown up knowing about that. You also grew up sort of knowing that there's a sort of re-curving of the hurricanes once they form out here. They recurve around this high-pressure system in the Atlantic, and then they sort of swing back and move it in northeastly direction. That's sort of like the typical track that hurricanes take. And that's primarily due to where your sea surface temperatures are warm enough to support hurricane development. So we need to have sea surface temperatures are at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit or 26 degrees Celsius for hurricanes to develop, spawn, and to actually keep going because hurricanes are a heat engine that take the heat, latent heat from the surface of the ocean, and as it triggers your convection in the system itself, that's what keeps them going. So as soon as you go over land where there's no longer that interface with the ocean, then they tend to die out. So you'll notice that there's that increase in the area that is likely to help spawn those hurricanes. And that sort of area grows as the water heats up and continues to heat up in August and September because, remember, water takes a while to heat up, takes a while to cool on down, and you're seeing that sort of reflected in there. And when you put all of that together, that sort of gives us a peek in the Atlantic Basin around the 10th of September in terms of when hurricane maximum actually tends to occur. So it all sort of goes together from that perspective. Some of my colleagues who work in hurricanes a lot, one of them is David Valley, who is at the National Weather Service in Tonson, Massachusetts, and he put together these figures that show you the range and the tracks that hurricanes have taken, especially the ones that have hit the southern part of New England in the last century. And he's broken it up for the first part of the century and the last part of the century. So I'm going to show you two slides on here. Don't blink because they will change. And you'll notice that in the first part of the century there was sort of coming along here and doing that pretty much a 90-degree hit on the New England coastline, which of course has implications for people who live in the northern part of New England at that time of the century because they would have been aware of having experience and lived through a hurricane, which is not necessarily the case in the second half of the 1900s where it was more of a glancing blow that the hurricanes did. So again, that has implications for if you were living in northern parts of New England in the second half of the century. Now when you put all of this together it looks something like this and you've got a tremendous amount of action taking place in here and the importance of this diagram is that hurricanes that strike us here in New England they've got a couple characteristics that we know. One of them is the fact that they tend to accelerate along the eastern seaboard here before they make landfall and because they move so quickly before they hit us in order for us to take mitigative type of action we actually have to be looking at them when they're down in the Caribbean. Because it takes about 48 hours or two days for evacuations to actually be implemented and carried out. So for us here in New England it's this time frame that's actually important for us. So if I zoom in just on Vermont and try to see what that story looks like from the 1850s which is when we have tracks for up until the end of 2011 you'll see that there are a number of those events that have crisscrossed the state and some that have actually tracked to the north of us giving us rainfall as a result in both of those cases there. And speaking of the track, the actual track that is taken makes a difference because the second thing that's important for New England hurricanes is that most of the rain falls on the left hand side of the track. So they accelerate really really quickly and then they dump a lot of their rain on the left side or the western side of the track. So for something like Hurricane Donna that sort of crisscrossed in a more land-based sense there was precipitation here but something like Bob which had a more coastal track there was less precipitation observed in the more inland regions. So track makes a big difference for us. So if we try and think about all of the hurricanes that have sort of influenced us here in New England and how much rain they brought, David was able to sort of cull out the ones that produced at least four inches of rain and you'll notice that there's some years that tend to have lots and lots of those hurricanes in place things like the mid-50s, there were lots of them that produced that. Another time frame that also produced a lot was in 2004. And 2005, yes, Katrina was still powerful enough not just to hit the Gulf Coast but to sort of come on up and still produce at least four inches of rain for us here in New England. So there are a number of ways that we can look at this and sort of tease it out. And the hurricanes that have struck us here making a direct hit if we try and think about it from strength or intensity when you say major hurricane we're talking about category three, four and five we've had some category three hurricanes that have struck us with a direct hit over the course of time as well. Okay, so let's take a walk back through memory lane to look at each of these three and then talk about what are some of the overarching lessons that we've learned from each of them. So let's go back to Katrina. Katrina occurred, a mainland fall in New Orleans in here on the 29th of August 2005. Katrina was in a particularly active hurricane season and if you look really closely can you see that Katrina was down here number 11, number nine was Irene. There was an Irene before our Irene, okay. But the other interesting thing about the 2005 season is the length of it. It went all the way down through into December and actually into January of 2006. We went through the entire alphabet and actually had to go into the Greek alphabet. There were that many storms in that particular year. So 28 named storms just in that 2005 season alone. So there was a lot going on at that particular time. And when you look at Katrina, here's as she's passing over Southern Florida, still a tropical storm at that point. But then rapid intensification as she got into the Gulf and intensified to category five just before striking New Orleans. So if you look at why that occurred, what you're looking at here are sea surface temperatures. You see how particularly warm they are. What was the magic number in Celsius? It was 80 Fahrenheit, but how much for Celsius? 26, okay. So 26 Celsius. So we're talking about some super hot water that had passed over across in here to go from a category three to a category five, almost in the blink of an eye, okay. And I have a number of these in here. And one of them is going to take us through from June of 2005 all the way through, well, let's see. June of 2005, all the way through to when Katrina hits. And what you'll notice as the animation goes through, you're seeing changes in the sea surface temperatures. You're seeing all of the storms that are occurring. And as each storm occurs, they're going to draw a line that shows you the track in here. And then the animation will slow down when it gets to Katrina. So we're seeing a couple more of these storms. There's another track going like that. We're in about getting close to mid-July in here. So another month to go before Katrina hits. And you're noticing the temperatures in the Gulf as well as the Caribbean are starting to heat up. So we're now getting close to the middle of August. Look at how those temperatures are really, really spiking in here. And now Katrina's going to enter in here. You're going to see her go across, start to intensify, and boom, make that dead-on hit. Now, that dead-on hit looks something like this from a satellite joined with radar perspective. Tremendous amount of rainfall being produced from this category five. It looks something like this from a shot of the Superdome, which was where a lot of the temporary housing, a lot of temporary shelters took place during the event itself. So hurricanes, when they make landfall, a lot of times what they will do is they will merge with the front. So we've got a frontal system in here. And as Katrina made landfall, that would help her merge and move towards us here in the northeast. So again, very, very quickly you will see that direct hit and then merge with the frontal system so that there's this tremendous amount of precipitation being garnered as a result of that system moving forward. Now, the direction that hurricanes make with landfall is absolutely critically important. So if they make landfall with a dead-on hit like this, watch me for a sec, it looks something like this. So here comes the hurricane. This is my land and it hits directly like that. You're going to have a tremendous amount of damage occurring because it's the sort of forward translational speed of the hurricane actually hitting the landscape. And so there's a lot of damage that takes place in the inland direction and then there's less severe damage on either side of that. So Katrina was a great example of that and a lot of the storm surge that went along with Katrina was as much as 22 feet in Mississippi right next door to Louisiana and between 10 and 15 feet in Alabama right next door as well. So you're seeing some of that inland motion and flooding that took place. This is the after. This is the before and you can see some additional streams being set up. Now, keep this diagram in mind because it's going to become important to us with things like Sandy and Irene. If the hurricane is moving parallel to the coast, the amount of damage is going to be restricted to along the coast also in a parallel direction and then less severe as you go inland. So again, that track relative to your coastline is critically important. So as a result of all of this precipitation, we saw things like a lot of flooding that took place. So you're seeing at least 10 feet of standing water several weeks after Katrina. But right next door in Mississippi, you've got a juxtaposition between beachfront property that's probably worth several million with the high density, lower socioeconomic houses that were also flooded one next to the other. Now, something that you probably may or may not remember from Katrina is the tremendous tree damage, the tremendous tree loss that actually took place. And we'll come back to that in about 10 minutes or so because this has implications for climate change as well. All right, so a lot of the damage was focused in on the New Orleans region in here, especially when Lake Pontchartrain breached a lot of the levees. And you see things like the lakefront airport being flooded. Similar to the sort of flooding of JFK and LaGuardia that took place with Sandy as well. Okay, all right. So Katrina was in 2005. Let's fast forward to 2011 and look at Irene. And the images for Irene are probably still fresh in our mind because it's sort of like the flood of record for us. And how do we work through that? How do we talk about that? And a lot of these images are actually sort of put together by my colleagues at the National Weather Service at the International Airport here in Burlington. Some of the images that we may have seen personally, things like a lot of the loss here in the intervail, but also a lot of the infrastructure that was damaged as a result of Irene. So Irene's track looked like this. She was one of the few hurricanes to make landfall in 2011. And the track of Irene was actually a success story for the National Weather Service. This is my temperamental one here. Of course, this is the one that actually works everywhere else except for here. That's okay. No, it was nice, but we don't actually need it. No, this is the next one. Nice try though, thank you. So what you would have seen in the previous one was Irene coming along and making a dead hit like this. And because she was sort of parallel to the coast, a lot of the maximum winds, which is what you see on the left-hand side here, and the maximum amount of rainfall was also going to be sort of the same as her track, pretty much parallel to the track itself. Heaviest rainfall, 12 inches or plus down in the Carolinas, over 8 inches here in Vermont. Heaviest rainfall in Irene was actually 28 inches down in the Caribbean. And just like Katrina, just like Sandy, Irene was a heat engine and if we're looking at, let me get you situated, there's Long Island, there's New Jersey. So this is the water offshore and you can see that there's some warm water right off the shore here. Then it starts to get a little bit on the cooler side. This is from the 24th of August. Irene made landfall on the 28th. And so this from the 29th kind of shows you that a lot of the energy has been sort of sucked out of the North Atlantic and leaving very, very cold waters as a result. So we've got a before and an after showing you that effect of the heat engine. Now, one of the reasons why there was so much damage with Irene has to do a lot with the track and it has to do a lot with the influence of topography. So let's just take a walk through here as we look at Irene's track on the 28th itself. So we've got three hour time blocks here. So nice little rapid movement here. And then between 11am and 2pm, very little movement here. Why is that? Well, it's gone between the Hudson Valley region in here and we're actually crossing over some very, very complex topography in the southern part of Vermont going into the Connecticut Valley. So we've got very, very slow motion and whenever you have a system that slows down it's going to have the potential to wring itself out. And if it's wringing itself out over very steep topography that's sort of like two of the worst things that could possibly happen. So we've got that taking place in here. And again, very, very slow movement between two and five and you see that rapid acceleration up the Connecticut Valley moving into the southern part of Canada going into extra tropical status. So that's one big piece, that influence of topography and sort of shifting basins. The other big influence was, remember I told you how a lot of times hurricanes merge with fronts and that helps with the amount of precipitation occurring? Well, just like we had that front in Katrina we had similar sort of front in Irene and if you remember your symbology this particular type of front is called a stationary front which means it's not going too much anywhere. Because we have coal there trying to go this way, warm air trying to go the other way, it's kind of like a tug of war. One trying to go one way, one trying to go the other way, not going anywhere and so it sits in place and you add to that Irene's motion and Irene's amount of precipitation and you get the third whammy in terms of why you got a lot of precipitation across in this region in here. So when you put it all together and you look at it from a big picture perspective there's a satellite stuff in white, there's your radar in green. Do you see these two little elongated blobs here? Okay, these are the same two elongated blobs blown up. Those are the rainfall that we got over southern Vermont and it should come as no surprise, it's following topography, right? So we've got that north-south sort of blob to it. So my colleagues at FEMA put together this map, my colleagues at the National Weather Service put together that map and I like to show this in my classes because it shows them the influence of different types of interpolation systems. So when we're talking about GIS and we're talking about how do you interpolate records you can see the difference between the results that you get by the method that you actually choose. Regardless of that you've got that bullseye down the south here and another bullseye along the central part of the Connecticut Valley. Now, the final reason why we had a lot of precipitation in Irene is there was a tropical sort of train coming up towards us and I know you can't see this very well but if I tell you this is Nova Scotia, Newfoundland down in here. This is Florida down in here. This is Cuba here. Got yourself situated, alright? So there's this little tropical plume coming up towards us along the eastern seaboard and it has even more moisture in it on the day when it actually made landfall. So we've got an additional boost in terms of how much rain is going to fall because we've got that tropical component kind of feeding in towards us here in the northeast. So Irene produced a lot of rainfall at least eight inches across some parts of the state but Irene was actually preceded by a drought and so drought conditions would be good enough themselves but just before Irene we got a little bit of rain and that little bit of rain about an inch or so, an inch and a half in the central part of Vermont starts to soak into the soil, starts to prime the soil so the soil is starting to get wet even before Irene hit. And when you look at it there's a very nice spatial pattern to where that blob of wet soil is in the southern part of the state, not in the northern part so much and so again when all of these things come together that's part of the reason why we saw the extent of damage that we actually did in the southern part of the state itself. Now just to make sure we're not imagining this if I compare Irene with another hurricane that had a similar track Hurricane Floyd in 1999 Hurricane Floyd came up and there's its track along here, there's that blue line Hurricane Floyd, we're comparing it in this middle one with Irene Hurricane Floyd did not produce a flood at all even though there was 14 and a half inches on the top of Mount Mansfield Why did it not produce a flood? It's because we were coming out at 18 months worth of drought, 18 months and so that has a big impact on how much water can actually percolate down into the soil and whether we're going to flood or not so knowing your antecedent conditions are critically important Why was there a lot of damage? Part of it was because of what we've seen in past floods so for example here's the Montgomery flood just west of Jay Peak in 1997 we've seen this occur before and I was down in Waterbury on Saturday and something says let's just look at what the Google map looks like for Waterbury Waterbury is kind of like a little island in here between the interstate Mountains on either side and the Manuski right there so we've got this juxtaposition between rivers, roads, infrastructure in general and a lot of that is historical, a lot of it's also geographical because if you've got a V-shaped valley like this guess where everything is going to go down in the valley can't build anywhere else so Jonathan Croft at V-Trans, Agency of Transportation pulled out a map from 1927 that showed where all of the damage occurred across the state's infrastructure and then superimposed where a lot of those road closures and other types of infrastructure damage were from Irene and they are very very close in terms of a lot of the places that were struck twice so here's a quick zoom that shows you that 27 versus Irene type of flooding across in here and you sort of highlighted in yellows and greens the different types of road closures the different types of systems that were actually affected and V-Trans was at the core of all of the Irene recovery and there was a very quick partnership with Google so that all Google mashups came out of this and one of the lessons that we learned and applied from all of this was they took the same technology so when the earthquake took place in Haiti a couple of years later we were able to just transfer that knowledge transfer the techniques seamlessly so our last hurricane that we're going to talk a little bit about is Hurricane Sandy and just as we've done in the past here's the track for Hurricane Sandy and one of the things that you'll notice is that Sandy did a left turn did a westward turn and made landfall in New Jersey unlike the sort of typical sort of recurventure that we've looked at before why is this? Well, what I've tried to do is to sort of insert themes that have come through from all of my colleagues in the geography department and one of the things that's critically important is the role of the Arctic because you've probably heard about the polar vortex yep, can't go anywhere without hearing about that one Arctic amplification you probably also vaguely remember hearing about that what's the big deal with that? if this is the Arctic here and these are the mid-latitudes here if there's a steep gradient between the two then your jet stream is going to be more locked in place in a further north position and it will tend to meander less as we've got ice melt and changes in the Arctic here that difference between the Arctic regions and your mid-latitude regions is less so the gradient gets less and similar to what happens with rivers you know when rivers don't have a lot of energy they meander a lot so similar to that and we're still learning about this this is ongoing research we've got a meandering jet stream that does sort of loop-de-doop and it looks something like this and so what we end up with is places in the atmosphere where there are high pressure systems places in the atmosphere with their low pressure systems and because there's that pronounced loop-de-doop like this they kind of stick in place we call that blocking so there's a lot of blocking that's taking place and with Sandy there was this tremendous amount of blocking in the Atlantic so that she couldn't move to the east like she usually would have so there's this blocking to the east that was critically important the other thing about Sandy is there are block here so she can't go east but when she looks west there's another block here see that high pressure system here so there's a block here so she can't go west but look what's in between her her here and the high pressure system another front you're starting to see the pattern so Sandy is trapped between these two high pressure systems there's a front here and there's only one place that she can go which is towards this direction here now do you see this little red symbol here all right hurricanes don't usually have fronts in them and this means that even at this particular point in time Sandy was no longer a pure hurricane Sandy had started to transition into becoming what's called post-tropical or extra-tropical so she's got characteristics that kind of look like a snowstorm like we have outside but she also has some of the patterns some of the structure of still being a hurricane and that has challenges that we'll talk about in a sec so when she moved on land and joined with the front you'll see that all of this kind of comes together with that nice long tail that is characteristic of Sandy so you've got moisture on this side you've got rainfall on that side and you see that long tail that sort of coincides with where that front was that she sort of merged across with and produced a tremendous amount of damage especially in barrier islands along New Jersey but also in places like Saturn Island and Rockaway in New York City itself so how does this all come together from a vulnerability perspective we'll talk a bit about this from a human perspective but also from a systems perspective so there are various ways that we can think about how hurricanes highlight or produce or exacerbate the vulnerabilities that are in our system and some of them are historical some of them have to do with nuances that are gender based and there are some that have to do a lot with socioeconomic status some of them that we don't always remember have to do with health both mental health as well as physical health and then there's another piece in here that we also don't always remember is the language piece and a lot of the warnings a lot of the things that go out in one language only will miss some populations and then therefore render them a little bit more vulnerable than others so Dr. Sherry Morse in our department put this together when we did a teach-in during the Katrina event and when you look at it you've got a location across in here so New Orleans County which is where a lot of the damage took place and maybe some of the demographics that were characteristic of the region pre-Katrina you'll see a large proportion of residents below the poverty line and a lot of those residents were also African-American very, very high spatial density in terms of where they actually lived so when you translate that to a map it looks something like this Lake Pontchartrain is up in here this is where it was breached across in that region there and you're seeing a lot of the flood that influenced a lot of that so that's some of the human piece the human face to the vulnerability Katrina was also what's called a netec disaster which means a natural disaster that then triggered a technological disaster in and of itself and part of that netec disaster is because there's a lot of drilling that takes place in the Gulf and it's something that you don't always necessarily think about but if you have a category 5 storm moving through there even if it's a small compact storm the wind feel and the precipitation feel is going to be enough to impact and influence a lot of the the oil production that's taking place in that region there so there's some of that that we don't always necessarily think about other parts of the ecosystem that are vulnerable include what happens to all of those sediments that were eroded and made their way down from the upland regions in Vermont all the way down to the Connecticut valley and out into the Long Island Sound you see a lot of that here so this is the 31st of August this is the 2nd of September this is two days after Irene struck Vermont so this is a rapid amount of sediment flow making its way down the Connecticut River and discharging into the Long Island Sound here and not only do we have this massive removal of all of these sediments which have influences on the farming and agricultural practices but it also stirs up the sediment in the Atlantic itself so that you get this massive algal blooms that are a secondary result of all of this so these are some chlorophyll maps that kind of show you the 28th in here and the 31st in here so again very very quick in terms of that stirring up of the sediments and producing a lot of algal blooms as a result now when hurricanes moving online one of the things that is critically important is the role of evacuation and is the evacuation mandatory or is it voluntary and this was highlighted a lot in both Katrina and in Sandy and this is what Katrina looked like in terms of evacuation so you know this is an interesting shot there are lots of people trying to get out of harm's way because they waited too long but if you look really really closely do you see the sign here okay this means that the traffic flow should have been going that way from bottom of the picture to the top of the picture everybody is going this way okay so fortunately everybody is leaving dodge literally because otherwise there would have been other transportation challenges shall we say alright so it was unplanned sense of some of the policies that needed to be in place actually man and staff things like this the other thing that we can think about in terms of evacuation and people needing to leave is whether it was forced whether they were ever able to return in some cases there are people who have never returned to Louisiana ten years later we have similar sorts of stories that came out of Sandy there are folks who have never been able to return to their homes in New Jersey and New York and they happen to find a place to rent right after the event they're still renting those places so there's a lot of sort of behind the scenes proactive planning that we can think about in terms of evacuation as a component of all vulnerability so thinking about that thinking about some other challenges like our special needs populations do we know where they are can we get them out safely do we have enough time to do so we have questions about moving inland or moving upland moving upland was probably maybe not the best choice in Irene it was the upland regions that flooded moving inland having grown up on an island when you think about it where do you evacuate to it's not as if a cruise ship is going to come along and we all jump on board and then we go somewhere else so evacuation in terms of where all of this is occurring is actually critically important and then there's this sort of stuff that Bill Reed who was the director of the National Hurricane Center for 40 years came up with and these quotation marks down in here oh it's not going to happen we need to leave which is what occurred in a lot of the hurricanes that we're talking about here but there's also this sort of like we're in New England this doesn't happen here this is a Florida thing so we don't really need to leave and that actually puts first responders at risk because they end up having to evacuate folks who call at the last minute instead of being able to devote their efforts in other places as well so there are a couple of other components of vulnerability that we can look at including the continuum in terms of how vulnerable you are and how does that stretch over through time both in the future as well as now there's a couple things that sort of increase how vulnerable we are and that includes things like are we able to respond are we at risk in terms of our exposure but also are the hazards changing Katrina, Irene and Sandy the physical shape and the physical morphology of them changed over the course of the event and that then produces different types of vulnerabilities for different communities so there are things that can actually decrease vulnerability and they include things like re-evaluating floodplain use which is what we've done quite a bit of in Vermont in the last couple years or so they also include things like increasing the stringency with which the codes are done I have an uncle in Florida, he came up and he looked at my house and goes wouldn't pass code in Florida because it wouldn't because Vermont codes are not as stringent as Florida codes are and so there are some of these things that we need to kind of think about and factor in here so layer on top of all of that are changing climate and what do we look at and what do we think about in terms of changing climate conditions and first thing that we usually think about, now let this run and then I'll talk a little bit about it will it run? I guess it won't another one of those ok so what this one would have done is it would have taken you through from 1880 to 2014 last year 2014 was the hottest year on record and it would have taken you through that over 120 year time span and showed you how the temperatures changed over different regions across the world through time, places that got hot places that got cold and then what you would have seen at the very end is this almost sort of blanket warming across pretty much most of the northern hemisphere alright so when we think about that, that's one of the sort of typical ways that we think about climate change from a temperature perspective but that's not the only piece that's important when we talk about hurricanes because hurricanes are also going to be dependent on sea surface stuff so we need to talk about whether there have been sea level changes over time, we know this sea level has risen and it's actually gotten faster in terms of that rise since 1993 but we can also talk about something called wind share and I'll tell you what that is in a sec so if we look at sea level rise and we look at the places that have an increased exposure to sea level rise, increased risk and increased vulnerability, we see that they're very high regions across the Gulf Coast also across the Carolinas and you can actually see some of these numbers for parts of the eastern seaboard closer to where we are in the Massachusetts region down into New Jersey I'm going to try one last time and hopefully I won't strike out what are the odds? probability function oh look at that so what are you looking at here? we're looking at the influence of sea surface temperatures and as sea surface temperatures rise, what you'll notice is that as the hurricanes move into places where there are hotter sea surface temperatures that's one piece of the puzzle. The next piece of the puzzle is we've got wind flow that starts to change so you've got winds that increase in one direction winds that increase in the other direction okay so let me show you what that does if you've got winds going in one direction winds going in the other direction that's called wind share and wind share is a bad thing for hurricanes. Hurricanes need to be able to develop without running into this sort of stuff so increasing sea surface temperatures also increases wind share so paradoxically decreases hurricane development so just hearing that sea surface temperatures are going to increase and therefore we'll have this increase in hurricanes you're missing the atmospheric piece in here so the sea surface stuff is one thing there's a lot of things going on when we think about climate change and we've already talked about the role of the Arctic we've talked about these plumes we've talked about El Niño and La Niño which are Pacific events and when there's an El Niño in place there's a lot of wind share so not too many hurricanes when there's a La Niña less wind share great for hurricanes and to be cute for the in-between place that's not the official term but you know what I mean and then the last thing we can talk about when we look at some of these dimensions here is the source region so here's a Sahara and this is the Cape Verde set of islands right off the coast here and that's where a lot of hurricanes actually form the problem with this is if there's a lot of dust coming off the Sahara like there was in this 2007 shot it really is a damper for hurricanes so again you can't look at just one piece you have to look at the entire climate system to get a sense of what's going on here so one way of trying to do that is Dr. Kerry Emanuel who came here as a Barack lecture in 2008 and I was fortunate to host him he developed this power dissipation index which brings together the frequency, the intensity and the duration of hurricanes and how that changes over their entire lifetime and in one of his recent papers a 2013 paper that index that he developed what he's done is he's gone back and looked at it from 1955 and sort of used some regional climate models that are hurricane specific to project this out through time across in here so he's able to sort of capture the historical period and sort of translate this out to the the future period this PDI, this power dissipation index is for Atlantic hurricanes only and when you put his work together he's at MIT with a lot of work that is going on at the Princeton lab one of the things that's challenging is the signal that you're seeing for Atlantic hurricanes is not the same as what's going on globally and Atlantic hurricanes make up 12% of what all of the hurricanes occur across the entire globe and so even though the intensity of hurricanes globally is projected to increase the intensity, the frequency, the amount of rainfall are all different ways of looking at it and when they tease this out they can say heavier rainfall rates in the Atlantic but actually decreasing numbers of hurricanes it may seem paradoxical but when you think about the physics of it you sort of see why some of this sort of tease itself out so some of that sort of up and down that variability that you see across through time sort of plays itself out in the near term as well so last year we actually had the fewest number of hurricanes since 1994 and a lot of that was because the atmosphere was really really dry so again yet another piece of puzzle that we need to kind of put in now the last piece in terms of changing climate is what's going on on the ground itself and remember this shot from Hurricane Katrina well that shot from Hurricane Katrina was emblematic of how many acres of forest were actually down as a result so this is the before this is the after all of the places that are red on here are places that have lost trees standing trees as a result and the widespreadness of all of this tree loss actually makes this region a source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere so you may not necessarily think of the sort of ongoing impacts of loss of tree standing tree biomass but it has this tremendous impact on the carbon cycle okay so we're going to bring this copy home and kind of wrap up with all of the things that have thrown at you and I know it's going to be a little bit ironic for a geographer to stand here and say geography matters but it's true geography does matter and from a topographic perspective here's that Hudson Valley Lake Champlain natural perfect corridor for hurricanes to pass up and down similar to the Connecticut Valley across in here perfect conduit for hurricanes to move up and down and get stuck in and then all the complex topography that this is part of the Appalachian chain across and in here as well so topography is critically important for us and the landscape itself is also critically important so we've got some changes over time in the Mississippi Delta and deltas and wetlands are one of the first lines of defense to dampening your hurricane landfall and because this is what it looked like before Katrina there wasn't that natural line of defense and so from a geographic biogiographic perspective it does matter so that's one big piece all the influences and what's taking place globally hemispherically are also critically important but something that we have not touched on and I will do so now is getting the word out being clear in your message using social media because rely on only one type of mechanism to get the word out has not proven to be the most effective and so how do we do this and how do we do it well is critically important and then there's something called hurricane fatigue and what that means is you've been warned about a hurricane nothing happens next time you've been warned about a hurricane there's a chance that you're not going to react okay and that's when things get really dicey because that's when you probably need to get out of harm's way so in an effort to make things as crystal clear as possible using few colors using colors that people with visual acuity challenges can still see and use the national hurricane center was working on this before sandy sandy just gave them the extra impetus to get this out they've got a new storm surge map that shows you where the potential for inundation will occur and you know my climatology natural hazards class we're going to be working with the USGS and the weather service to do a similar project for the Lake Champlain region in terms of inundation so if we had to sort of encapsulate all the things that we've talked about not just from a community perspective not just from a communications perspective if I had to pick one word to summarize all of this it would be systems because that's the only way that we can understand what's going on physically culturally socially but that's the only way you can actually make a difference in terms of moving forward as well so I brought some handouts if you want to read a little bit more about hurricanes and climate change and climate variables tornadoes and all that sort of stuff so please feel free to come see me after that's my contact information please don't be a stranger and I thank you all for coming and I thank you for your attention