Lessons learned, and some unheeded, after hurricanes - Princeton University
The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season does not end until after Thanksgiving in late November, but it has already been a memorable one. Harvey wrought havoc on Texas in August. Irma, which notched records for size and power, pounded the Caribbean and damaged parts of Florida in early September. It was soon followed by Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico.
Ning Lin, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University, studies hurricane hazards and risks. Several months before Hurricane Sandy battered the New Jersey Shore and the New York City region in 2012, she warned that the area was vulnerable to storm surges, which are destructive amounts of coastal water driven inland by storms. She published a paper in Nature Climate Change with Princeton professors Michael Oppenheimer and Erik Vanmarcke, as well as Kerry Emanuel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.