by Preparation for the Atlantic hurricane season is always a priority in the Caribbean, especially when forecasts show a high number of storms, as they do for 2024. The region’s most destructive storm in recent years, Hurricane Maria, came in September 2017 and she wreaked unprecedented havoc on Porto. Rico, Dominica, St. Croix and other islands.
Maria killed more than 3,000 people and caused about US$96 billion in damage. It knocked out Puerto Rico’s electric power system, leaving 1.5 million customers in the dark for up to 328 days – the longest blackout in US history. These outages had a cascading effect on other infrastructure, such as water and communication systems.
Today, there are new challenges related to the climate in the Caribbean region. Long days of extreme heat and humidity are increasing due to the accelerated warming of ocean waters.
In response to these increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, I joined forces with a dozen other researchers in 2023 to establish the Caribbean Climate Adaptation Network. Our goal is to connect scientists with communities and government agencies in the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico and provide scientific information that will help them prepare for and respond to these emerging climate extremes.
I am a coastal urban climatologist and a native of Puerto Rico. Launching this network was very important to me personally. I hope it will strengthen our existing partnerships for longer-term collaboration among leading academic researchers, vulnerable communities, government agencies and utility companies on the islands and act as a platform to reach the entire Caribbean.
Our mission is to develop new ways of representing the coastal-urban environment as a unified system – one that puts people at the heart and integrates man-made systems, such as buildings and infrastructure, with natural systems, such as the -atmosphere, ecosystems and oceans. All these elements address the challenge of a changing climate. We want to support vulnerable communities by providing research that can make them more resilient against climate change and bring them to the table so we can create better solutions together.
Learning from Puerto Rico’s recovery
Puerto Rico has made its power grid more resilient in the years since Maria hit, but challenges remain. More than 1 million customers on the island have experienced intermittent outages since the Hurricane. In September 2022, Hurricane Fiona – a much weaker Category 1 storm – made landfall in Puerto Rico and caused an island-wide blackout.
Puerto Rico’s power system is vulnerable primarily because its infrastructure is aging and the island is naturally exposed to recurring extreme events that fuel global warming. However, local utilities have made significant progress in hardening a very complex power system at every point, from generation to distribution. Solar power generation – particularly small-scale rooftop installations that can power individual homes and businesses during grid outages – plays a major role in making the system more resilient.
In 2023, I led a group of researchers as they recreated the effects of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico. We used a combination of geophysical models, engineering models of the power and water grids, reviews of damage reports and socioeconomic information to show how proposed hurricane preparedness strategies would affect low-income communities.
We learned that the most effective strategy to protect all members of the community is to harden the transmission system to handle impacts from future events like Hurricane Maria. New transmission towers that can withstand very high winds and soil saturation are likely to be needed. It may also include limiting exposure through measures such as burying power lines. We have not researched the costs of these solutions, but they are likely to be steep.
We have since regrouped to recreate other past major weather events in Puerto Rico and collect new data, with a focus on resilient power infrastructure and adaptation to a changing climate. For this work, we are installing unique sensors on the electricity transmission towers and wires, observing the natural conditions around these transmission assets. These devices continuously measure mechanical stresses on the towers and the ability of the transmission lines to manage power loads under different weather conditions and demands, including extreme weather events.
By recreating past storms, gathering new data about the health of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure and using machine learning algorithms, we plan to develop new predictive modeling frameworks that can predict risks of disruption to the electrical transmission system -consider during extreme weather events.
Inform regional action
In recent years, our research group has used satellite observations to detect that Caribbean sea surface temperatures are rising by nearly 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 Celsius) per decade – some of the fastest ocean warming on Earth. This trend has direct implications for the risk of frequent and intense hurricanes.
It also affects the ambient temperature on land, including driving extremes of heat. In the summer of 2023, a long heat wave occurred in the city of San Juan, with heat indices above 100 F (38 C). This level is considered unhealthy for most people.
Heat advisories and record temperatures have forced government officials to scramble to protect students. Public schools have taken the unprecedented step of canceling classes across the island. This event highlighted the importance of monitoring Caribbean ocean conditions and anticipating their effects on people, infrastructure and ecosystems.
My colleagues and I in the Caribbean Climate Adaptation Network believe that our findings will be transferable to other communities in the Caribbean. Our work can also inform coastal areas in the continental US where critical infrastructure is highly exposed and storms often hit the most vulnerable the hardest.
We hope that our work with communities will lead to broader education and new actionable science that can guide climate adaptation decisions and investments that reduce risks. Specifically, we aim to produce strategies to make island infrastructure much more resilient and adaptable, as well as safeguards to protect communities and maintain a sense of normalcy in a warmer climate.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.
It was written by: Jorge González-Cruz, University at Albany, State University of New York.
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Jorge González-Cruz receives funding from the US National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
