Cities At Risk of Super Cyclones
There are two parts to this story from Cosmos Magazine:
“A black swan is a surprise with huge impact,” she said yesterday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California. “For this study, we defined [it] as an event which cannot reasonably be anticipated based on historical records alone.”
1. A “black swan” cyclone has the intensity of Superstorm Sandy, but would occur somewhere such an event has not previously been recorded. According to the news item a similar storm hit New York in the 19th century. Computer simulations have enabled scientists to make a short list of places where a super cyclone could occur, even though none have previously.
2. Darwin, Tampa and Dubai made that short list. Darwin (see below) and Tampa have some degree of cyclone expectation, so presumably they are reasonably prepared. But Dubai is the big stand out. I have no idea how that kind of terrain (all sand) would cope, and I doubt they have much drainage set up in such a dry land to cope with a 10 meter flood. It could be truly devastating for them one day – but fortunately that could be thousands of years into the future.
Offshore from Darwin – the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory – the waters are also shallow and hot. And, devastating as it was – Cyclone Tracy killed 65 people and destroyed 70% of the city’s homes – Tracy was a “compact” storm that produced a storm surge of only 1.6 meters, a mere kitten compared to what her simulations show might happen every 20,000 or 30,000 years.
