Author: Sujata Gupta / Source: Science News
WASHINGTON — 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…
The post Tidal floods driven by climate change may hurt small businesses appeared first on FeedBox.