Storm warningsMaking storm warnings more exact, useful
The College of Staten Island (CSI)is the home of one of the most powerful mainframe computer systems in the country, an outgrowth of the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Decade of Science initiative. Following August 2011 Hurricane Irene, CSI scientistsset out to use that computing horsepower to generate scientific data hard enough to make the warnings something more than abstract. They fed millions of data points into the supercomputers, turning an admixture of geology, oceanography, climatology, and land surveys into a set of highly specific projections. Then, on 25 October 2012, Superstorm Sandy hit, and the actual water surges could be measured against the surge projections of the CSI model. On street after street, the computer model predicted flooding to within a foot of the actual surges.
New Yorkers are famous for being unflappable, but in the fall of 2011 William Fritz was worried that the city had taken Hurricane Irene a little too much in stride. Like other climate concerned scientists, Fritz, a geologist at the College of Staten Island (CSI) considered Irene a precursor of more powerful and frequent storms in coming years. Where he saw a heads-up, however, others saw a worst-case scenario that wasn’t so bad.
“Many people thought Irene was as bad a hurricane as we could get in New York,” says Fritz. “But it wasn’t. We really dodged a bullet.”
A City University of New York release reports that Fritz, a Montana native who has since become CSI’s interim president, has spent most of his career specializing in volcanic eruptions and other geological hazards. In recent years, however, he has turned his attention to idiosyncratic coastlines, like Staten Island’s, and what happens when prehistoric geology meets twenty-first-century climate change. Irene, he says, was “mostly a rain event” — absent the atmospheric conditions that create the real worst-case scenario: a storm surge powerful enough to overwhelm low-lying and minimally protected coastal areas. If New York dodged a bullet with Irene, it could be said that Staten Island dodged a missile.
If you look at a map and imagine a hurricane coming off the ocean, it might seem that the island’s broad Atlantic shoreline is like a protected harbor tucked between the shores of Brooklyn and New Jersey. In fact, it is the opposite: the geography creates a funnel effect. Also, the sea floor near shore is pitched like a ramp that accelerates a storm surge. Staten Island’s shorefront communities are like the crumple zone of a car in a head-on collision.
“We don’t get hit as often as people in the South,” Fritz says, “but when we do get hit we’re probably more vulnerable than any place on the entire Eastern seaboard.”
As Fritz saw it, CSI was in a unique position to show how much worse storms of the future could be — and to lead the way in making Staten Island a little less vulnerable by making it a bit more prepared. CSI is the home of one of the most powerful mainframe computer systems in the country, an outgrowth of CUNY’s Decade of Science initiative. Fritz and two colleagues — fellow geologist Alan Benimoff and Michael Kress, a computer scientist who
