This week’s killer freeze within the U.S. was no surprise.
Government and personal meteorologists saw it coming, some nearly three weeks beforehand . They started sounding warnings fortnight before time. They talked to officials. They issued blunt warnings through social media.
And yet catastrophe happened. a minimum of 20 people have died and 4 million homes at some point lost power, heat or water.
Experts said meteorologists had both sorts of sciences down right: the math-oriented atmospheric physics for the forecast and therefore the squishy social sciences on the way to get their message across.
“This became a disaster due to human and infrastructure frailty, a scarcity of designing for the worst case scenario and therefore the enormity of the acute weather,” said disaster science professor Jeannette Sutton of University at Albany in ny .
The event shows how unprepared the state and its infrastructure are for extreme weather events which will become bigger problems with global climate change , meteorologists and disaster experts said.
Insured damages — only a fraction of the important costs — for the nearly week-long intense freeze starting Valentine’s Day weekend are probably $18 billion, consistent with a preliminary estimate from the risk-modeling firm Karen Clark & Company.
Kim Klockow-McClain heads the National Weather Service’s behavioral insights unit, which focuses on the way to make forecasts and warnings easier for people to know and act on.
People heard the message and got the warnings, she said. For various reasons — thinking cold is not any big deal, not having experienced this sort of utmost cold, and focusing more on snow and ice than the temperature — they were unprepared, Klockow-McClain said.
“The meteorology was far and away the simplest a part of this,” Klockow-McClain said.
Private winter storm expert Judah Cohen of Atmospheric and Environmental Research first blogged about the danger on Jan. 25. He said the meteorological signal from the Arctic, where the cold air was escaping from, “was literally blinking red. it had been the strongest I’d seen.”
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