I'm Back!

I'm Back!

After a two-month break from blogging, I'm back! I expect to be on social media frequently during the upcoming months due to several factors:

1. We are approaching the peak of the 2015 Atlantic Hurricane Season.

2. Tropical Storm Erika in the Atlantic and Hurricane Ignacio in the Central Pacific are both forecast to approach U.S. coastlines early next week. It appears that Erika may approach the coast of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, while Ignacio approaches the Hawaiian Islands from the Southeast.

TS Erika has shown explosive convection in the Eastern Caribbean during the past 12 hours. If the system can maintain organization for the next 48 hours, it will likely enter a more favorable environment and strengthen.

3. Saturday, August 29, is the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi. Many events in these states are commemorating the anniversary of this historic storm. I will be giving a talk at the Katrina and Rita Symposium at LSU on Fri Aug 28, along with colleagues Barry Keim, Craig Colten and Amanda Lewis.

Here is a link to the program: http://sites01.lsu.edu/wp/ored/katrina-10/.

The Katrina & Rita Symposium will be held at the LSU Digital Media Center from 9AM- 5PM on Fri Aug 28.

4. Climate Central has expressed interest in helping me reach a wider audience. This will be an excellent partnership, as Climate Central has a great reputation in the climate science community and focuses a lot of attention on education and outreach. Some of that content will parallel updates on this blog.

Catching Up

This year has been really busy here at LSU! NOAA's SCIPP RISA program, which funds my work, values stakeholder-driven research. So over the past several months I have done a combination of research and outreach. Here are some highlights:

1. In May I participated in a Coastal Tools Cafe in St. Petersburg, Florida, organized by the Gulf of Mexico Alliance. I also presented storm surge research to a group of Florida educators.

2. In June I gave a storm surge presentation to a group of visiting scientists from the Caribbean region. Their program was sponsored by USAID.

3. Earlier this year I worked with co-authors Barry Keim and David Sathiaraj to complete revisions on a massive publication that was published in June in Reviews of Geophysics. The paper titled, "A Review of Tropical Cyclone-Generated Storm Surges: Global Data Sources, Observations and Impacts," provides an overview of global storm surge observations and impacts, while documenting the creation of SURGEDAT, a global storm surge database.

Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014RG000477/full

Our paper in Reviews of Geophysics provides an overview of tropical cyclone-generated storm surges around the world, as well as the creation of a global storm surge database.

4. The SCIPP and SECC RISA programs have collaborated to improve storm surge data for Florida and the Southeast US Coast. I have also worked closely with students at LSU to improve Gulf Coast surge data. We added more than 200 new observations to SURGEDAT that came completely from raw tide gauge data. We are now analyzing these data for several papers.

Hurricane Gustav (2008) generated a storm surge (difference between green and blue lines) exceeding 4 ft at Grand Isle, LA. I worked with a team of students to extract raw surge data and add these obs to SURGEDAT. This process added more than 200 new observations to the SURGEDAT database along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Source: NOAA Tides and Currents

Anyway, it's great to be back! I'm looking forward to jumping back into social media and interacting with many of you during the second half of the Atlantic Hurricane Season!