Houston’s Tall Buildings and Concrete Sprawl Made Harvey’s Rain and Flooding Worse

The science is clear that in order to prevent more extreme weather events like hurricanes, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. Thursday, EcoWatch reported on a study that found major hurricanes in the past decade were made five to 10 percent wetter because of global warming, and another study last year calculated that the record rainfall that flooded Texas during Hurricane Harvey was made three times more likely due to climate change.
Now, a second study focusing on Hurricane Harvey that was published in Nature Wednesday pointed to another thing we can do to reduce the impact of these devastating storms: change the way we build cities.
Researchers at the University of Princeton and the University of Iowa used computer models and historical data to determine that urbanization in Houston made both the flooding and the record rainfall worse than it would have been in a rural area, a Princeton press release explained.
New article published in the journal Nature by IIHR researchers and colleagues from@PrincetonU linking urban sprawl… https://t.co/nTHNnBT6ij— IIHR (@IIHR)1542224069.0
While this can help Houston make changes going forward, it also has major implications for other Southeast and Gulf cities facing the threat of wetter storms.
"Hurricane Harvey's impacts on Houston highlight hazards to coastal cities along the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard of the United States," co-author and Princeton civil and environmental engineering professor James Smith said in the press release. "An unfortunate repeat performance from Hurricane Florence this year underscores the problems of extreme tropical cyclone rainfall in urban settings."
Houston has both grown up and out in recent years, and both of those had an impact on rainfall and flood risk. But how does that work exactly?
Flooding
Urbanization's impact on flooding is pretty common sense. More concrete streets and sidewalks means less water can be absorbed into the ground, leaving it to flood those streets instead.
Researchers compared yearly flood peaks with population growth, and also compared the contemporary results with flood peaks from the 1950s, when Houston was much less built up. Sure enough, as development increased, so did flood risk.
"Urbanization is generally associated with a significant reduction in storm-water infiltration," Director of Iowa's Hydroscience and Engineering research center (IIHR) Gabriele Villarini explained in the press release. "Houston has experienced one of the most impressive urban-development booms in U.S. history, and with growth comes an increase in impervious surfaces. This increase in urbanization, combined with the region's flat clay terrain, represents a very problematic mix, even with flood-mitigation measures in place."
Rainfall
The reason that urbanization increases rainfall is a little more complicated. Basically, the increased number and height of buildings creates something called "surface roughness" that increases friction and, therefore, rainfall when the storm winds blow over it.
"When Hurricane Harvey blew into Houston, it literally got snagged on the city's tall skyscrapers and towers," Villarini said. "The friction caused by high winds buffeting tall buildings created a drag effect that influenced air and heat movement and resulted in optimal conditions for precipitation."
Researchers used computer models to run the same storm over the same geographic area with Houston's current infrastructure and with open fields. They found that less rain fell and that rainfall patterns changed in the imaginary rural Houston, as this graphic shows.
Rainfall from Harvey in urban v. rural Houston@3rdrockhome
Now that the researchers have shown the impact current urban design has on storms, they hope that urban planners will use that information to reduce risk.
"For every new roadway poured and for every new high-rise erected, there is an increased risk for more adverse rainfall and flooding, and that's certainly something that city officials and residents should consider when they contemplate future growth," Villarini concluded.
The growing Texas solar industry is offering a safe harbor to unemployed oil and gas professionals amidst the latest oil and gas industry bust, this one brought on by the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Houston Chronicle reports.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
This month, a new era began in the fight against plastic pollution.
- Historic Agreement on Plastic Pollution Reached by 180+ Countries ... ›
- U.S. Leads the World in Plastic Waste, New Study Finds - EcoWatch ›
- EU Bans Exporting Unsorted Plastic Waste to Poorer Countries ... ›
Trending
Sweden's reindeer have a problem. In winter, they feed on lichens buried beneath the snow. But the climate crisis is making this difficult. Warmer temperatures mean moisture sometimes falls as rain instead of snow. When the air refreezes, a layer of ice forms between the reindeer and their meal, forcing them to wander further in search of ideal conditions. And sometimes, this means crossing busy roads.
- San Antonio, Texas Unveils Largest Highway Crossing for Wildlife in ... ›
- Wildlife Crossings a Huge Success - EcoWatch ›
Heatwaves are not just distinct to the land. A recent study found lakes are susceptible to temperature rise too, causing "lake heatwaves," The Independent reported.
- Climate Change Will Be Sudden and Cataclysmic Unless We Act Now ›
- There's a Heatwave at the Arctic 'Doomsday Vault' - EcoWatch ›
- Marine Heatwaves Destroy Ocean Ecosystems Like Wildfires ... ›
By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>