Part I: Planning for a Climate-Changed World

As the global picture grows grimmer, states and cities are searching for the fine-scale predictions they need to prepare for emergencies–and to keep the faucets running.

On December 11, 1992, a powerful northeaster coalesced off the eastern seaboard of the United States, and an eight-foot storm surge struck New York City. Seawater swamped the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to a depth of six feet, cascaded down PATH subway stairs in Hoboken, NJ, and forced LaGuardia Airport and many roads and subways lines to close. Had the storm been slightly stronger, a 10-foot surge could have devastated a far wider region, inundating low-lying areas like Coney Island and Manhattan’s financial district and overwhelming the 14 sewage plants dotting the New York City coastline.


A flood of comparable height in New York City’s environs should occur about once every 100 years, on average, in the estimation of one Columbia University study. But global warming and rising sea levels–as well as the possibility of more-intense precipitation, stronger storms, and altered storm trajectories–will make such disasters more frequent. And to protect the people who live and work where disaster threatens, the critical first step is to determine how quickly and by how much, exactly, the threat is increasing. That knowledge is essential to deciding how seriously to consider specific countermeasures; for New York, these could range from mandatory evacuation plans for seaside neighborhoods to multibillion-dollar storm-surge barriers spanning the Verrazano Narrows and other key channels.

Technology Review