Author(s): Maitlyn Lydahl, Jennifer Le, Mark Shafer, Aimee Franklin
Year: 2022
Preparedness for tornadoes can range from individual actions, such as installing a tornado shelter, to community actions, such as installing storm sirens. This study examined how worldview affects preferences for mitigation options. The study found that people with individualistic worldviews favored preparations for the long-term that benefit individuals more than those that benefit the community.
Author(s): Brittany Babin, Devin Metoyer, Anna Reilly, Chelsea Carter, Vincent Brown, Charles Simson
Year: 2024
During winter 2023/2024, SCIPP worked alongside the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) to draft a report titled, “Heat-Related Emergency Department Visits in Louisiana: Review of Syndromic Surveillance Data for April through October 2023.” The report details the historic heat of 2023 and provides important information for heat safety. Additionally, SCIPP’s Vincent Brown and Charles Simson co-produced Python code with the LDH for a heat-related illness dashboard on their website that shows near-real time daily maximum temperatures and emergency department visits across Louisiana. The dashboard is available here.
Extreme rainfall events are hazardous and costly. They have increased in parts of the United States, and climate models project that trend to continue. Effective communication of potential threats and impacts associated with extreme rainfall events is one of the foci of a weather forecaster’s job and aligns with the National Weather Service (NWS)’s mission to protect life and property. This research investigated how NWS forecasters processed and communicated information about extreme rainfall events that occurred in the south-central United States between 2015 and 2019. The study also explored forecasters’ perceptions of the relationship between the events and climate change and whether those perceptions impacted the forecasts, including how forecast information was communicated.
Tulsa is at a crossroads: develop climate adaptation strategies for the future or continue with business as usual. To understand if and how the city is progressing with adaptation, we conducted a series of interviews, analyzed documents from Tulsa city offices, and surveyed residents to hear where they are already experiencing extreme heat and flooding. The results are clear: Tulsa struggles with environmental issues across the board and is doing little when it comes to planning for the future. There is a deep distrust of the city government from residents and even across various agencies. Despite the adoption of a new comprehensive plan in June 2023, there is no sustainability or climate office within the city that can champion the environmental portions of the plan, making it unclear if these actions will be implemented.
Climate justice directly connects to previously-researched areas by SCIPP, including disaster resilience and climate change adaptation, in increasingly meaningful ways. Therefore, Simone Domingue, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for SCIPP, hosted a series of webinars and conversations to raise awareness of climate justice’s significance in future adaptation. The webinars offered actionable ideas for participants to bring back to their communities for proactive planning. A summary report was created and provides panelist details, webinar resources, and webinar evaluation highlights.
This document was created by SCIPP and the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. It describes the benefits of local hazard mitigation plans and why they matter to communities. The document includes: a description of what hazard mitigation is and the hazards Oklahoma faces, costs of weather and climate events in Oklahoma, the benefits of hazard mitigation plans, examples of projects communities can implement with funding from the FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, cost savings from mitigation actions, and hazard mitigation success stories in Oklahoma. SCIPP plans to create this resource for other states in our region in the future.
Author(s): Mark Shafer, Randy Peppler, Kritika Pathak
Year: 2022
An assessment of the state of knowledge on prediction of wildfire and winter storms on the seasonal to subseasonal scale was produced to support operations of the Oklahoma National Guard. The report discusses predictability and global circulation linkages, weather conditions associated with wildfire and winter storms, global weather and climate patterns, and applications to subseasonal and seasonal prediction.
This document includes maps that were created by Kristin Calhoun at the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory/Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies and display annual and seasonal (winter, spring, summer, and fall) mean cloud-to-ground lightning density (strikes per km2) in Texas from 1995-2019.
