MIT researchers are mapping extreme weather risks — and building tools to act on them

Warming temperatures are fueling more extreme weather-related events — catastrophic floods, severe hurricanes and cyclones, and wildfires exacerbated by drought. But the tools used by local communities, emergency and public safety agencies, and insurance and risk markets have not kept pace with the up-to-date data and modeling for accurately predicting how these events will evolve.

Addressing that shortcoming was one of five research areas selected for MIT's 2022 Climate Grand Challenges, an ambitious effort to accelerate science-based solutions to climate problems. The area, titled "Preparing for a New World of Weather and Climate Extremes," focuses on tools to help evaluate a location's vulnerabilities to flooding, cyclones, humid heat waves, or other climate-related events.

Four years later, collaborations among more than 40 faculty and student researchers on Weather and Climate Extremes projects have yielded 29 published research papers and digital tools and datasets that are already in use or close to deployment. Individual projects cut across forecasting, risk assessment, on-the-ground planning, and resilient infrastructure.

"Communities across the United States and around the world are already confronting the consequences of extreme weather," says Evelyn Wang, MIT's vice president for energy and climate. "Through the Climate Grand Challenges, an interdisciplinary team at MIT is advancing the science, technologies, and practical strategies needed to help communities anticipate these risks and build greater resilience."

Reducing scientific uncertainties

Paul O'Gorman, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT and co-lead of Weather and Climate Extremes, is refining the science behind forecasting extreme weather events, such as last year's major flooding events in Central Texas and in Pakistan. "There have been a lot of unprecedented, record-breaking events," he says, "and we want to understand how they are changing as the climate warms, and how they're changing in different regions."

One aspect that his group has been examining is the relationship between extreme rainfall events and a warming climate. Climate models predict that extreme rainfall increases less in summer than other seasons in much of the United States and Europe. O'Gorman's team found that these seasonal shifts stem from not only how much water is in the atmosphere, which is measured by specific humidity, but also how close it is to saturation, which is measured by relative humidity.

Kerry Emanuel, MIT professor of atmospheric science who was also a co-lead of Weather and Climate Extremes, is researching better ways to estimate the risks of extreme hurricanes and severe convective storms, such as thunderstorms and tornadoes. "For hurricanes, we're pretty much there. We can reproduce the statistics of real hurricanes extremely well just using coarse-grained weather data that has no hurricanes in it," he says. But for severe convective storms, "we're not close to being there," and these storms "in the last decade have cost more lives and more damage than hurricanes."

Improving resilience

Another phase of the Grand Challenge, led by Miho Mazereeuw, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Architecture and a leading expert on resilient design, translates the information from scientific modeling and data collection into tools for on-the-ground planners. For example, working with leaders and community members in Boston and Broward County, Florida, the team has developed interactive web-based tools that make it easier to plan for impacts such as flooding over a broad range of scenarios.

"When an extreme event happens, there is a gap between scientific knowledge and actionable public information," says Aditya Barve, a research scientist in Mazereeuw's Urban Risk Lab. "The idea is to target the gap through tools in community emergency data collection, proactive recovery planning, and AI-assisted tools for at-scale visualization of future climate impacts, so that communities are prepared when something happens."

As for recovery after extreme weather events, Mazereeuw points out that most municipalities have an emergency response plan, but few create a recovery plan that includes housing before the event. "In almost all cases, the resources available after a disaster are much larger," she says. "By having a plan in place, those resources can fit the vision of the place moving forward."

Optimizing energy infrastructure

Associate Professor Michael Howland is working to analyze the impacts of extreme weather on energy infrastructure with a team that includes Jessika Trancik, a professor in the MIT Institute of Data Systems and Society, and Moshe Ben-Akiva, the Edmund K. Turner Professor in Civil Engineering at MIT. The team is particularly looking at impacts on the electrical power system and ways to optimize decisions on the placement and sizing of new energy infrastructure.

Howland says electrical power systems are increasingly being altered by two things at the same time: the proliferation of renewable energy and storage technologies, and large-scale changes in weather and extreme events driven by climate change. "Each of these would independently push our electrical power system potentially outside of what we are used to, and their combined, synergistic impacts could be even larger because they are occurring simultaneously," he says.

Their optimization model for the siting of power resources in Texas resulted in placing a number of wind power plants along the Gulf Coast. It turns out that the typical daily cycle of winds is complementary, so that wind farms distributed between both locations tend to smooth each other out and to better complement solar power generation, easing burdens on the grid.

Emanuel adds that the Weather and Climate Extremes Grand Challenge, and other projects working to pinpoint the kinds of risks that can be expected from a changing climate, have produced a great deal of specific and detailed information that could guide political, economic, and civic decision-making. Applying it in the real world can be a slow process — "like steering a supertanker," he says — but progress will come.