Physically-based Assessment of Hurricane Surge Threat under Climate Change

Storm surges are responsible for much of the damage and loss of life associated with landfalling hurricanes. Understanding how global warming will affect hurricane surges thus holds great interest. As general circulation models (GCMs) cannot simulate hurricane surges directly, we couple a GCM-driven hurricane model with hydrodynamic models to simulate large numbers of synthetic surge events under projected climates and assess surge threat, as an example, for New York City (NYC). Struck by many intense hurricanes in recorded history and prehistory, NYC is highly vulnerable to storm surges. We show that the change of storm climatology will probably increase the surge risk for NYC; results based on two GCMs show the distribution of surge levels shifting to higher values by a magnitude comparable to the projected sea-level rise (SLR). The combined effects of storm climatology change and a 1 m SLR may cause the present NYC 100-yr surge flooding to occur every 3–20 yr and the present 500-yr flooding to occur every 25–240 yr by the end of the century.United States. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Postdoctoral Fellowship Program)National Science Foundation (U.S.

Lifetime measurements in neutron-rich Co-63,Co-65 isotopes using the AGATA demonstrator

Lifetimes of the low-lying (11/2-) states in 63,65Co have been measured employing the recoil distance doppler shift method (RDDS) with the AGATA γ-ray array and the PRISMA mass spectrometer. These nuclei were populated via a multinucleon transfer reaction by bombarding a 238U target with a beam of 64Ni. The experimental B(E2) reduced transition probabilities for 63,65Co are well reproduced by large-scale shell-model calculations that predict a constant trend of the B(E2) values up to the N=40 67Co isotop