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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 25 2019, @07:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-would-have-guessed dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Sea level rise, driven by climate change, is causing increased flooding during high tides along much of the U.S. coastline. Though such floods are usually minor, a new study suggests that car traffic patterns could help reveal how floods harm an area’s business revenues.

Tidal flooding events “are not one in a hundred years or one in a thousand years. They’re once a week,” says Miyuki Hino, an environmental social scientist at Stanford University.

Though increasingly frequent, such floods often last only a few hours. That can make it hard to tally the economic losses they cause. Hino and her colleagues sought to quantify those impacts by looking at parking data in the historic downtown of Annapolis, Md., located on the Chesapeake Bay. 

The team first built a database of flood events using flood images posted to social media at the same times that tide gauge readings showed high water levels, in order to eliminate rain-caused flooding. Hino’s team estimates there were 44 tidal floods in 2017, classified as minor, modest or severe.

The team then looked at parking transactions in a nearby lot for changes in parking revenues. Flood events coincided with drops in visitation ranging from 37 to 89 percent, depending on the severity of the flooding, the researchers found. That contributed to about 3,000 fewer visitors, or a 1.7 percent decrease, in 2017, according to the study published online February 15 in Science Advances.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 25 2019, @03:08PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 25 2019, @03:08PM (#806315) Journal

    2/ I take issue with the final figure; the extrapolation is comical and presumably introduced to make the paper higher impact. They extrapolate based on a 1 % measurement to a 25 % reduction in footfall with no justification for the model.

    Even worse, how much of that alleged current 1.7% decrease is actually due to climate change, and how much would happen anyway even if the sea levels didn't rise?