Floods

Parts of Northeast Italy remain under a red weather alert after devastating rains swept through the area last week. More than six months’ worth of water fell from the sky in just 36 hours inthe region of Emilia-Romagna and parts of neighboring Marche. Rivers swelled and breached their banks, submerging roads, homes, and farm fields in the important agricultural district. The heavy precipitation also triggered hundreds of landslides, cutting entire mountain towns off from ground-based emergency assistance, according to…

Rain is one of the natural forces that does not require an invitation and can fall at any time. The only action that humans can take is to manage the water that comes from the skies. The management of rainwater is primarily the responsibility of governments as they have the ability to create good drainage infrastructure for the cities they oversee. However, if they fail to take care of this essential task, the consequences can be catastrophic. In recent incidents of destruction caused by rains, a video has surfaced…

After a wild winter of more than a dozen huge storms and record-breaking snowfall in the Sierra Nevadas, California’s big flood season is just getting started. Last week, the National Weather Service predicted that the Merced River could flood parts of Yosemite National Park, thanks to a combination of unseasonably warm temperatures and melting snowpack. Yosemite officials announced that the park would close in anticipation of the flooding. The Merced River runs through some of the park’s most popular areas. EarlyMonday…

100-year RP hazard map for the Chi-Mun River basin (using the IPSL-CM6A-LR CMIP6 GCM). (a) Reference historical-hazard map (based on reanalysis data), (b) hazard map constructed using the runoff-correction method (historical), (c) hazard map based on uncorrected GCM runoff (historical), (d) hazard map constructed using the lookup method, (e) hazard map constructed using the runoff-correction method (future) and (f) hazard map based on uncorrected GCM…

Last week, the Steve Jobs Archive was released as a free eBook that anyone can read either online in a browser, or downloaded in an eBook reader. The book told the late Steve Jobs's story through his own emails, interviews, and presentations, giving a bigger picture of the man himself. That same eBook was also released in a beautiful looking hard-back book and handed out to employees of Apple and Disney – who promptly put the book on eBay.Selling for up to $1000Apple handed out copies with the release of the eBook to…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain After months of heavy rain across California and record snow in the southern Sierra Nevada, state officials warn that melting snow could turn into flooding as the state's skies turn sunnier this spring and summer. The Tulare Lake and San Joaquin River basins, which already saw storm flooding this…

The floods that impacted Durban in April 2022 were the most catastrophic yet, recorded in KwaZulu-Natal. Credit: Chante Shatz. The disastrous flood that hit Durban in April 2022 was the most catastrophic natural disaster yet recorded in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in collective terms of lives lost, homes and infrastructure damaged or destroyed and economic impact. …

After signing up to YouTube as a new, 13-year-old user, Sky News found that YouTube flooded the feed with Andrew Tate videos, despite the professional misogynist being banned from the platform. The report highlights criticisms that YouTube is algorithmically pushing young boys to become fans of the toxic influencer who’s facing human trafficking charges in Romania.Making the Facebook Papers PublicIn their investigation, Sky News posed as the fictional userand scrolled YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to test whether or not…

Magnitude of the flood divide as a function of its physioclimatic controls. a,b, Normalized magnitude (that is, divided by the long-term mean river discharge q¯) of the flood divide in the study dataset as a function of the hydrograph recession exponent (a) and the coefficient of variation of daily flows (b). Shaded areas span the 95% variability range of theoretical predictions and provide an estimate of their uncertainties. Gray markers display the…

ALLENSWORTH, Calif. —  Last week, when it rained for days and floodwaters poured onto roads, the people of Allensworth grabbed shovels and revved up tractors.The makeshift barriers they built with sandbags, gravel and loose sand kept the water back.Now, the town of nearly 600 people northwest of Bakersfield faces another threat — a broken levee, along with yet another storm expected to hit in a few days.On Saturday morning, the residents were back at work, shoveling sand onto a 3-foot high berm.Allensworth, the state’s…