Erin Coughlan de Perez is working with a wide range of collaborators to see beyond the limitations of conventional weather records and help develop new perspectives for disaster planning.
New Perspectives on Disaster Planning Amidst Extreme Weather
Erin Coughlan de Perez, an Associate Professor at the Friedman School and Research Director at the Feinstein International Center, has contributed to two recent publications on the topic of extreme, unprecedented weather.
"How to Stop Being Surprised by Unprecedented Weather," an open-access study published in Nature Communications, aims to help communities prepare for extreme weather events that have never been documented in modern history.
Coughlan de Perez, experts from the Climate Adaptation Services Foundation, the University of Reading, and other international organizations contributed to the research. The study reviews different ways people can learn about unprecedented weather events, such as using natural records like tree rings to unlock climate data from centuries ago that modern instruments have missed.
We calculated which places are seeing increasing risk of extreme heat and found that many locations in the Southeast US are "sitting ducks" when it comes to extreme heatwaves.
A second open-access paper, "Storylines of Unprecedented Extremes in the Southeast United States," was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in mid-March. Coughlan de Perez is the corresponding author. The paper posits that planning for disasters by relying solely on historical events is like "driving forward while only looking in the rearview mirror." To expand upon this limited perspective, researchers utilized a diverse range of weather simulations to assess the current risk of extreme weather events in case study areas across the southeastern United States.
"Farmers plan their agricultural operations based on many years of knowledge about what grows well in their location and what the risk might be to their crops. If they haven't experienced an extreme heatwave that kills their crops, they might not realize their risk," said Coughlan de Perez. "We calculated which places are seeing increasing risk of extreme heat and found that many locations in the Southeast US are "sitting ducks" when it comes to extreme heatwaves."
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