麻豆淫院

Georgia and northern Florida are likely to be hardest hit by increasing hurricane-induced power outages along the Atlantic coast in the future, with Hispanic, non-white and low-income populations most affected, according to new research led by the University of Michigan.

Hurricanes are predicted to become even more frequent and severe in the coming years if Earth's temperatures rise by another 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. A total 3掳C rise will bring increased outages to areas that have historically seen few service interruptions, such as the northern Atlantic Coast. And those increases will nearly double the costs of those outages, from today's $6.2 billion per year average to $11 billion in today's dollars.

The findings from the new research, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscore the need for planning and resource allocations that take these predictions into account to prepare for what's coming.

"There are parts of the country where we expect to see more outages, particularly northern Florida, the southern Atlantic, such as North Carolina and South Carolina, and some areas up into the mid-Atlantic," said Seth Guikema, U-M professor of civil and environmental engineering, as well as industrial and operations engineering, and co-corresponding author of the study. "Then there are areas where we have more uncertainty, places like Texas where our models suggest they'll have fewer outages."

Lower-income communities already experience longer waits for service restoration in some cases, and U-M's research identifies that as a problem that's likely to worsen.

To produce its analysis, U-M and its research partners combined data from models and data sets covering climate, hurricanes and the spatial distribution of socioeconomic variables. They are:

• Simulated hurricanes, 28,000 of them, based on atmospheric and oceanic data, processed by co-author, Kerry Emmanuel, formerly of M.I.T., and now chief scientific officer at WindRisk Tech.
• Historic outage data at the Census tract level, information that includes, in some cases, localized data as specific as wind characteristics, soil moisture and tree root depth.
• An evaluation, based on historical hurricane tracks and projections, as well as Census data, of which subpopulations would be impacted the most.
• The which measures costs from outages as well as estimates the benefits of efforts to improve reliability.

"What we wind up with is the areas that are, and will be, at highest risk for power outages," said Zaira Pagan Cajigas, a U-M alum and co-lead author on the research paper. "We can go further and see the population makeup in those areas, and that's how we identified that Hispanics, non-whites, low-income and elderly residents bear the brunt of these incidents."

Roughly 78% of major power outages in the U.S. result from weather events, and those events have been occurring more often in recent years. Tropical cyclones are responsible for 9 out of 10 major outages. As Earth exceeds the Paris Agreement warming target, they are intensifying faster, bringing more rainfall, moving more slowly and penetrating further inland.

"Our hope is that this analysis will help government agencies, utilities, and individual businesses and residents better understand where system hardening and other climate adaptation actions need to be taken and the potential degree of change in outage risk and costs in the future," Guikema said.