Paul Quinn and Eleanor Starkey’s natural flood risk management and community involvement work over in the Haltwhistle Burn catchment (Northumberland) has been shortlisted for The Guardian University Awards 2016, under the ‘Social and Community Impact‘ category. This follows on from the media coverage which the ‘kerplunk’ inspired system received back in 2015. The work forms part of a wider project which involves a team of CESER researchers (PhD student Eleanor Starkey and her supervisors Geoff Parkin, Paul Quinn and Andy Large) who have worked in partnership with Tyne Rivers Trust.

It contributes to one of three categories which Newcastle University has been shortlisted for. Category winners will be announced at the awards ceremony in London on 16 March 2016.

Robert Nicholls, CESER director Richard Dawson, and Sophie Day launch a new book, Broad Scale Coastal Simulation: New Techniques to Understand and Manage Shorelines in the Third Millennium, that reports in full, for the first time, on the Tyndall Coastal Simulator.

Coastal scientists, engineers and policy makers around the world are increasingly recognising the challenge of sustainable coastal management in the third millennium. Long-term geomorphological, climatic and socio-economic changes are influencing coastal systems at unprecedented spatial scales and over extended timeframes – with profound implications for people, coastal infrastructure and settlements, biodiversity, ecosystem services and governance of the coastal zone. Coastal researchers and decision-makers are presently ill-equipped to deal with the problems emerging from multiple drivers of change across multiple coastal sectors. This reflects that the coast is a linked system, and any change in one area or sector may influence the impacts for other areas or sectors.

An integrated systems based approach that seeks to represent the interactions between different issues within the coastal zone is fundamental to understanding the impact of global change on coastlines and to assist the sustainable management of our shorelines over the twenty-first century. In 2000, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an interdisciplinary consortium of engineers, scientists and social scientists, was established in the UK. This provided a unique platform to develop a coastal research programme with a major focus on an integrated assessment – known as the Tyndall Coastal Simulator. An earlier synthesis paper from this research by Dawson et al. (2009) won the Lloyd’s Science of Risk Research Prize for Climate Change in 2012.

Unlike other coastal books, this his book is not a handbook for design, nor is it a compendium of methods that cover every aspect of coastal systems or a compilation of case studies with differing aims. Rather it is a perspective on integrated assessment as applied to coastal problems, which represents a topic where there is an important gap in the literature.  Whilst each chapter can be read in isolation, each chapter also contributes to the wider integrated assessment. Throughout the book, the process of integrating information on the different environmental, social and economic dimensions of coastal management.

Taking a systems perspective of the natural, physical and social environment at a scale that is relevant to livelihoods and the economy has enabled the Tyndall Centre tea to analyse how the coastal system as a whole might evolve in a changing physical and socioeconomic environment. The application of the Tyndall Coastal Simulator to North Norfolk, UK, demonstrates that it is now feasible to explore long-term integrated projections of coastal processes such as geomorphology, flood risk and land use change, greatly increasing the evidence base available for coastal management decisions. Moreover, the methods and integrated assessment framework are transferable to other coastal areas.

The integrated assessment highlights a number of the opportunities, challenges and trade-offs and the need for a long-term perspective on coastal policy in order to allow adaptation to coastal change to occur, for example, the difficulties faced by coastal managers, who in reducing the risk of erosion may actually enhance flood risk (or the cost and viability of mitigating this risk) at sites within the same coastal system. Such results were captured within the Tyndall Coastal Simulator interface allowing the technical results to be accessible to a wide range of stakeholders.

It is now clear that the management of any coastline and the governance structures upon which that management depends need to reflect the connectivity between the various coastal features that comprise the natural and human coastal system and consequential trade-offs in management policy. Furthermore, the Norfolk analysis relates the technical aspects of coastal change to the present, and often emotive, debate around long-term shoreline management – in particular it strengthens the argument for a change in the widespread historic management approach of increasing lengths of “hold the line” towards allowing as much of the coastline as possible to return to a more natural and dynamic configuration, including the associated sediment supply from eroding coasts. Inevitably, this raises a number of fundamental questions from stakeholders, which we have explored through using results from the Tyndall Coastal Simulator, about how to address the concerns of directly and indirectly affected landowners and householders to facilitate this fundamental change in management approach.

More generally, the book shows the great potential for coastal stakeholders to develop improved understanding of coastal futures and for decisions to be based on a stronger evidence base. However, the work exposed the magnitude of many uncertainties about coastal futures.  Although the broadscale coastal simulation of the type presented here can provide a rich evidence base, in the context of adaptation it should be regularly reassessed, debated and reviewed as part of an ongoing process to reflect improving knowledge and changing priorities. Thus, the Tyndall Coastal Simulator and tools like it have the potential to provide a platform for the longer-term adaptation process.

Access the full research article for free:
http://www.infrastructure-complexity.com/content/2/1/1

Research just published by experts in the Centre for Earth Systems Engineering Research, working with Southampton University have shown how permutable infrastructure components can reduce the risks of cascading failures.

The inter-connected and complex nature of modern infrastructure systems has created a “network of networks” that, when disrupted by deliberate action, or natural hazard event, can result in cascading failure that leads to the complete fragmentation of all connected systems from the destruction of a comparatively small number of nodes.

Existing “network of networks” approaches are still in infancy and have shown limits when trying to model the robustness of real-world systems, due to simplifying assumptions regarding network interdependencies and post-attack viability.

This work challenge such assumptions and demonstrates, through simulation, how failure to represent certain infrastructure properties can lead to inappropriate, or counterproductive, network adaptation and protection strategies in many circumstances.

1. Most assessments to date have assumed that in the event of a cascading failure only the largest single contiguous part of a network remains viable.  Whilst this measure is of some use, it fails to recognise that merely isolating infrastructure components does not necessarily mean they fail.  For example, dry roads within a town that has been cut off by floodwater, will still function even if the roads into the town do not.
2. It is possible to influence the nature of the failure propagation between coupled networks by allowing nodes in a given network to have multiple supporting nodes in another network.  For example, providing a back up power supply.
3. Previous studies have shown that removing interdependent links reduces the chance of cascading failure.  However, we find that this is counterproductive when you consider the nature of infrastructure systems and that one infrastructure network often requires a certain degree of interdependence with another in order to be viable..  For example, flooding of a road network may impact our ability to access railway stations, having a knock-on impact upon train use.  Obviously, removing all road-rail connections will ensure the rail network does not receive a minimum amount of passengers, goods, and personnel in order to operate.

Finally, we propose the use of permutable or adaptable systems as efficient and effective mechanisms to give network of network systems rewiring capabilities.  These permutable nodes and links appear to protect coupled networks from the destructive consequences of isolation and cascading failure and at the same time preserve network resources by limiting the amount of redundancy needed to absorb a disturbance.  These permutable systems are different from multi-service conduits.  For example, an electric line that carries phone communications at the same time would propagate failure through both phone and electricity networks in case of malfunction while, on the other hand, components that can provide alternated states of coupling to different networks limit the topological propagation of cascading failure while providing an alternate configuration to the system because of their rewiring capabilities.  Examples include roads convertible to landing strips, tunnels that can alternate between traffic and storm water management (e.g. the Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel (SMART) in Kuala Lumpur), energy storage devices on board electric vehicles that can be plugged to the power grid when not in use so as to store and produce energy whenever needed.

Read the full article for free:
Khoury M, Bullock S, Fu G, and Dawson RJ (2015) Improving measures of topological robustness in networks of networks and suggestion of a novel way to counter both failure propagation and isolation, J. Infrastructure Complexity, 2(1):1-20.

Experts from Newcastle University’s Centre for Earth Systems Enginering Resarch fear for water supplies and wildlife. Mountains may be hotting up faster than previously thought with potentially dramatic consequences, fear North scientists. An international team of experts, including researchers from Newcastle University, is now calling for urgent and rigorous monitoring of temperature patterns in mountain regions. This could lead to threats ranging from water shortages and the possible extinction of some alpine plants and animal life. Co-authors of the research, Prof Hayley Fowler and Dr Nathan Forsythe, from Newcastle University’s School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, have been working on climate change in the Himalayas for over a decade. Prof Fowler said: “Changes to climate, glaciers and snow cover in the high mountains of Asia are of vital importance for water supplies to a fifth of the world’s population, so understanding past changes are key to understanding what might happen in the future.” Lead author, Dr Nick Pepin of the University of Portsmouth, said: “Most current predictions are based on incomplete and imperfect data, but if we are right and mountains are warming more rapidly than other environments, the social and economic consequences could be serious, and we could see much more dramatic changes much sooner than previously thought.” The most striking evidence that mountain regions are warming more rapidly than surrounding regions comes from the Tibetan plateau. Here temperatures have risen steadily over the past 50 years and the rate of change is speeding up. But masked by this general climate warming are pronounced differences at different elevations. For example, over the past 20 years temperatures above 4,000 metres have warmed nearly 75% faster than temperatures in areas below 2,000 metres. The team of scientists came together as part of the Mountain Research Initiative, a mountain global change research effort funded by the Swiss National Foundation. Between them, they have studied data on mountain temperatures worldwide collected over the past 60-70 years. Dr Pepin said: “There is growing evidence that high mountain regions are warming faster than lower elevations and such warming can accelerate many other environmental changes such as glacial melt and vegetation change, but scientists urgently need more and better data to confirm this.” Among the reasons the researchers examined for faster rates of temperature increase in mountain regions are: •Loss of snow and ice, leading to more exposed land surface at high elevation warming up faster in the sun; •Increasing release of heat in the high atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which, when condensing as clouds at high elevation, releases more heat to the mountain environment; •Aerosol pollutants at low elevations, including haze, dust and smoke, reduces warming at those elevations, thus increasing the difference in rates of warming between low and high elevations; •Dust and soot deposited on the surface at high elevations causes more incoming sunlight to be converted to heat. •The world’s highest mountain, Mt Everest, stands at 8,848 m. More than 250 other mountains, including Mt Elbrus in Russia, Mt Denali in Alaska, Mt Aconcagua in Argentina and Mt Kilimanjaro in Africa, also all top the 5,000m mark. Ben Nevis, in Scotland, is the UK’s highest mountain, standing at 1,344 m.

Video link

Full paper: Pepin, N., Bradley, N.S., Diaz, H.F., Baraer, M., Caceres, E.B., Forsythe, N., Fowler, H.J., Greenwood, G., Hashmi, M.Z., Liu, X.D., Miller, J., Ning, L., Ohmura, A., Palazzi, E., Rangwala, I., Schoener, W., Severskiy, I., Shahgedanova, M., Wang, M.B., Williamson S.N., and Yang, D.Q. 2015. Elevation-Dependent Warming in Mountain Regions of the World. Nature Climate Change 5, 424–430 doi:10.1038/nclimate2563

The Caribbean Weather Impact Group (CARIWIG) Project Supports Risk-Based Decision-Making in the Caribbean

Bridgetown, Barbados; February 12, 2015 – The Caribbean Weather Impacts Group (CARIWIG) project is supporting risk-based decision-making in the Caribbean region. The Project hosted a policy workshop and training event at the Savannah Hotel and at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus in Barbados this week (February 10 – 12). The training exposed 34 participants, including institutional leaders and representatives from across Caribbean institutions, to a suite of tools developed under the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) supported initiative. The four tools developed under the project for use in the Caribbean are:

Regional Climate Models and Caribbean Assessment of Regional Drought (CARiDRO)

The Caribbean Assessment Regional DROught (CARiDRO) was designed to facilitate drought assessment in the context of the Caribbean and Central America. It is a flexible system that should accommodate the requirements of different users. The online tool is composed of two main sections: a descriptive one where the user can find information on how to use the tool as well as terms and concepts that are useful. The other section is where the user can fill out a form indicate the necessary results required. CARiDRO allows the user to access and to process different observed and model datasets for the Caribbean Region to produce results based on two Drought Indexes, the Standardized Precipitation Index (McKee,1993) and the Standardized Precipitation-Evaporation Index (Serrano et al, 2010).

Weather generator

The Weather Generator provides daily weather time series for use in impact assessments and impact models. It generates weather data for the future that can be used across sectors (e.g., water, agriculture, health) in the same way as historic weather series. The main benefit and utility of the WG is that it provides information for a single point location – directly comparable to what is observed at weather stations.

The Simple Model for Advecting Storms & Hurricanes (SMASH)

SMASH is a simple model based on past memorable and notable storms that can generate grids for each 15 minute period in a modeled storm. The variables include precipitation rate and wind speed.

Portal and observed data

This web portal provides information and datasets concerning:

• The observed climate of the present day
• Regional Climate Model projection of the future climate
• Future scenarios of weather downscaled from the Regional Climate Model projections
• Scenarios of weather derived from hypothetical tropical cyclone events

This web portal is intended for use by regional and national institutions, consultants and scientists concerned with the climate and impacts of future climate change in the Caribbean region. Accordingly, a considerable degree of contextual knowledge of climate change and its impacts, and analytical expertise is assumed.

Further information on the project:  http://www.cariwig.org/

The tools will provide an open access online resource, and will advance efforts under the project to provide locally relevant and unbiased climate change information that is specific to the Caribbean and relevant to the region’s planning horizons. The integration of the tools into national policy agendas across the region is crucial to ensuring effective decision-making and improving climate knowledge and action in the region. It is a significant “contribution to the body of knowledge to aid in decision-making. Benefits will come through people being sensitized about what is Climate Change and their singular responsibility to engage in climate resilient actions based on their understanding of climate vulnerabilities and impacts,” according to Keith Nichols, the CCCCC’s project development specialist.

The efficacy of the tools in strengthening climate decision-making and planning in the Caribbean is being tested through ten case studies focussed on areas such as drought, agriculture, water resources, coastal zone structures, health (dengue fever), and urban development and flooding. The case studies offer a real-world testing ground for the demonstration and enhancement of the utility of the four CARIWIG tools for regional decision-making and the building of capacity regionally through training exercises.

The CARIWIG project is being implemented collaboratively by Newcastle University, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), the University of East Anglia, the University of the West Indies and the Institute of Meteorology in Cuba (INSMET).