A document by Sujan Pal. Click on the document to view its contents.

This study investigates changes and uncertainties to cool-season (November-March) storm tides along the U.S. northeast coast in the 21st century under the high RCP8.5 emission scenario compared to late 20th century. A high-fidelity (50-m coastal resolution) hydrodynamic storm tide model is forced with three dynamically-downscaled regional climate models (RCMs) over three decadal periods (historical, mid-21st century and late-21st century) to project future changes in peak storm tide elevations at coastal counties in the region. While there is no absolute consensus on future changes to storm tides, for any one future decade two out of the three RCMs project an increase at counties along the Hudson River, Delaware River and northern Chesapeake Bay due to more intense cyclones that track inland of these locations leading to favorable surge generating conditions. The same RCMs also project a decrease at counties facing the open ocean in the mid-Atlantic Bight as cyclone densities just offshore of the coastline decrease, particularly by late-century. The larger tidal range in northern areas leads to significant uncertainty due to the arbitrary relationship between the local tidal stage and when a surge event occurs, which affects both the magnitude and sign of the projected changes. This tide-surge timing is less important in the Chesapeake Bay and unimportant in Albemarle Sound and Pamlico Sound. Similar to other recent studies, we highlight that sea level rise is likely to be more critical than storm climatology for future changes to the cool-season coastal flooding potential.

The Array of Things (AoT) is a collaborative effort among leading scientists, universities, local government and communities in Chicago to collect real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use. The AoT is composed of nodes that will measure and sense the urban environment of Chicago and provide openly accessible data in near real time. One component of each node is the ChemSense board, which uses chemical sensors to measure five gas-phase species: ozone, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. In addition, the ChemSense board provides information on total reducing gases and total oxidizing gases. The nodes also include meteorological information and cameras that will provide pedestrian and traffic counts using computer vision algorithms. Because the ChemSense boards rely on low-cost sensors, characterizing the sensor responses is critical to understanding the applicability of the AoT for urban air quality issues. As a first step, a node with the ChemSense board was installed at an EPA air quality monitoring site within the City of Chicago, which is run by the Cook County Department of Environment and Sustainability. The EPA site has Federal Reference Method monitors for ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide. After collecting collocation data for seven months, the results are promising for ozone, but much less so for sulfur dioxide. For nitrogen dioxide, unexplained spikes not observed in the EPA data drive a poor fit. Results from the collocation project will be used to consider larger issues for characterizing the air quality component of the AoT.