Island recovery

The coverage of hurricane damage to the islands is still slowly leaking out.

While Puerto Rico's crisis is clearly the largest, Rutgers has developed a relationship with St Croix over the last several years, so is has been particularly tough watching the stories from that island.

Local news has been very hit and miss. The St Croix Source is understandably more focused on recovery (the virtue of the week was gentleness). The VI Daily News has included some interesting updates.  A station in Tampa posted a few photos.

The New York Times has a compelling set of images and stories from the American Virgin Islands that are heartbreaking. They go inside the main hospital on St Thomas and report that it will most likely have to be torn down and rebuilt.

"Reinforcing the sense of despair, St. Croix was hit especially hard by Maria after being spared the worst of Irma’s ferocity. And what had been a staging ground there for relief operations for St. Thomas and St. John was suddenly thrown into a state of emergency."

BTW, over the last month there have been so many different NPS parks and parkland impacted, that they keep their news on a separate website: https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/news/severe-weather-response.htm  The news ranges from Kitty Hawk to De Soto to Buck Island. Although for several properties, the current status is little more than "All employees have been accounted for."

Hurricane Joaquin

With Hurricane Joaquin targeting the Chesapeake and Washington DC, I highly recommend keeping an eye on a blog that I have long enjoyed, the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang. They often have a nice mix of forecasts (raw material and general public info) and science that makes it worth the trip, even if they are a few hours away.

Is there class?

Check the official Rutgers campus status page.

Make your snow day special

Students stuck on campus for snow days sometimes struggle, wanting to do some creative and feeling trapped. If you are still struggling to fill your time with the current snow, you might consider what some other designers have tried. A few years ago our students made the most of snowballs and coloring. Beautiful, right? and it got in the paper. And maybe in a portfolio or two.

A Buffalo professor was trying to use snow to resculpt visitor experiences to an Olmsted park. The video below shows you more.



Snow days area great time for temporal creative expression. What are you going to do during the next one?
 

Snowy landscapes of NYC

With all this snow (and more to come) I like seeing productive use of the time. Mark Hough explored NYC's snowy landscapes and shares his photos with us on PlaNetizen.

How are you going to make the best of this?

Tornadoes from space

Various programmatic units at NASA have all been using the Oklahoma tornadoes to demonstrate their relevance to Planet Earth. 

You can watch a grainy video of the storms forming at Visible Earth.

Looking at Earth has higher resolution full color imagery and video.

Or, you can see the swatch of destruction in Terra's ASTER device. This is the one that really amazed me. You can see the path of destruction clearly in these images once you zoom in a little.

NASA's Nemo pic

NASA's image of the day seems particularly timely.

Keep warm.

Top Ten lists

As landscape architecture and environmental planning have increasingly acknowledged an important and central role for climate and weather, this list of Top 10 weather events of 2012 seems interesting for our few year-end readers. Might as well throw in Slate's list of Top new species too.

Are storms making your neighborhood unsafe?  Here's a map that might help.


It turns out that New Jersey has a pretty high rate of disaster related storms.

Wind map

Check out this very cool geovisualization of win in the US, as of right now. (h/t Kathleen)

July Hazards map

According to NOAA's Climate Predication Center, July looks like it will continue to be a rough month for plants and people just about everywhere.

Rain Rain

The USGS WaterWatch site gives you lots of gage data including live tracking of flooding. The graph below is a representation of the last 50 days. As I post this it looks like it is easing up, but the forecast looks like there is still a second stage to watch.





The second one is a live 5 day graph.  Of course, since it is live, if you see this post in August it might make less sense.  But, trust me, the Raritan has been rising.

Remember the snow?

This MODIS image from NASA (via Rutgers Climatatology) captures the snow cover back on January 31st.

Storm Surge Climatology and Modeling for the New York City Metropolitan Region

For the RU sophomores in Landscape Architecture, who will spend some of their fall exploring design responses to sea level change, this talk may be a good chance to peek ahead:

April 24
Storm Surge Climatology and Modeling for the New York City Metropolitan Region
Brian A. Colle, Stony Brook University (Friday, 2:15 seminar)
Environmental and Resource Sciences Building, Room 223, Cook Campus (Environmental Sciences)

First exam for EnvPlan postponed

In light of the complicated and unpredictable weather coming tomorrow, I have decided to go ahead and postpone the first exam for 11:372:231 Fundamentals of Environmental Planning from Monday to Thursday (March 5). One station says nearly a foot is expected, so you should anticipate bus delays, nasty driving conditions, and good sledding.

Please note: I will NOT cancel Monday's class unless Rutgers officially closes. Check here for official campus status. We will go ahead with Lecture 4/Chapter 4, which will be on the Second Exam.

Here is what the NWS says to expect:

Get ready.