Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction to host workshop in September on lessons from Hurricane Sandy

The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) will be hosting a workshop next month on lessons from Hurricane Sandy.

Storm Surge – Lessons from Hurricane Sandy will be held on Thursday, Sept. 3 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EST at the ICLR office on 20 Richmond St. E., Suite 210 in Toronto. The forum will feature a presentation from Dr. Adam Sobel, director and chief scientist of Columbia University’s Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. Dr. Sobel will be presenting information drawn from his recently published book Storm Surge.

Superstorm Sandy’s landfall on the northeastern coast of the United States in late October 2012 was forecast remarkably well in the days leading up to it, enabling “many life-saving preparations,” said information from the ICLR. However, another kind of forecast, equally accurate in its own way, had been available much earlier and yet was not nearly as effective at spurring preparedness, the institute said.

While the risks to the built environment of a Sandy-like event had been known for decades, little was done to make that built environment more resilient, and it suffered great damage as a result. This forecast “conforms to a historical pattern in which science-based warnings of the risk of a future disaster are not taken seriously until the disaster has happened at least once,” the ICLR information said.

The forum will help answer the following questions:

• What risks do we face from extreme weather and climate events, on the coasts and inland, now and in the future?

• Can we learn to make better use of scientific risk assessments with long time horizons? and

• How can we prepare for human-induced climate change, when – as Sandy was – it will be outside our experience?

Dr. Sobel (pictured right) – who received his PhD in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences – is part of a speaking tour hosted by the Marine Environmental Observation Prediction and Response Network. He is an atmospheric scientist who specializes in the dynamics of climate and weather, particularly in the tropics, on time scales of days to decades. A major focus of his current research is extreme events – such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts, and the risks these pose to human society in the present and future climate.

The workshop is part of the ICLR’s monthly Friday Forum series, “an informal discussion of current research and industry issues related to natural hazards.”

RSVP: Tracy Waddington (twaddington@iclr.org)

Webex: https://iclr.webex.com/iclr/onstage/g.php?MTID=ee5917a9d809e889dc262d09df4d661e2

Password: Sobel

Conference Call number:

Local: 416-343-2657

Toll free: 1-866-440-8938

Conference ID: 1712397#