Trade winds usually push warm water across the Pacific westward toward Oceania and Asia, causing cold water to surface along the coastlines of the tropical Americas, including parts of Mexico, Central America and South America.

But every few years, trade winds weaken during the early spring, and warmer water settles around these coasts and into the mid-Pacific.

This phenomenon is part of a broader climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The warm phase of ENSO is simply called El Niño. Stronger than usual trade winds, by contrast, push warm water westward, allowing more cool water to surface and bringing a La Niña pattern. El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, though recent research suggests climate change is affecting these patterns.

Fishermen in Peru first identified warmer than usual waters in the Pacific during the 1600s, and named the phenomenon “El Niño de Navidad,” since it often occurred near Christmas. Usually the rising, nutrient-rich cool waters brought a wealth of sea life to their nets. But once in a while, the bounty would shrink, coinciding with warmer waters the fishermen observed, typically during December.

Likewise, trade winds are naturally occurring and move east to west. For centuries, sailors used them to speed their cargo ships across oceans. Historical evidence suggests El Niño winds spurred the Spanish conquest of South America, allowing ships to reach northwestern parts of the continent that winds in years past had kept them from reaching. Climatologists are not entirely sure why trade winds weaken — sometimes they weaken seemingly randomly.

But Wenju Cai, director of southern hemisphere oceans research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, explained by email that “we know a bit.”

Cai pointed to the behavior of the Madden-Julien Oscillation, a moving mass of clouds, rain and wind over the Indian Ocean, discovered by climatologist Roland Madden and meteorologist Paul Julian in the 1970s, as one link to the intensity of trade winds over the Pacific.

El Niño patterns also mean shifting jet streams. Jet streams are currents of air that move roughly west to east and flow above trade winds. They are strongest around 6 to 8 miles above the earth’s surface, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Warmer Pacific waters cause the Pacific jet stream to dip south and extend across the southern U.S. and northern Mexico during strong El Niño years.

Jet streams form boundaries between warmer and cooler air, and high and low pressure. High pressure systems are more likely to bring fair weather and clearer skies, while low pressure systems are more likely to bring stormier weather.

During winter in the northern hemisphere, this dip in the jet stream typically results in warmer temperatures across much of Canada and the middle of the U.S., as well as more rain and flooding in southern California. Much of the Southeast, especially around the Florida panhandle, often gets cooler temperatures, as this area is just south of where the jet stream typically settles during El Niño.

This piece is a companion to our comprehensive explainer, “El Niño: What it is, how it devastates economies, and where it intersects with climate change.”

The post How El Niño and La Niña climate patterns form appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

There is a band of water across the equatorial Pacific Ocean, stretching from the coast of South America through to the island nations of Southeast Asia, whose temperature climatologists closely monitor as a driver of global weather patterns.

Typically, warm water that settles around Indonesia during early spring works as an atmospheric engine, an energy source that affects weather patterns around the world for the coming year.

But every two to seven years, this atmospheric engine shifts. When unusually warm water settles instead off the western coasts of Mexico and South America during the spring, the moisture and energy released into the atmosphere can profoundly change regional weather, from North America and South America to Asia and Africa.

This phenomenon is part of a broader climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The warm phase of ENSO is simply called El Niño. La Niña, its opposite, happens when those eastern Pacific waters are cooler than normal in the spring. A third, neutral phase, happens when Pacific waters are near average temperature.

As of mid-November, forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration give a more than 55% chance of a strong El Niño this winter. Odds are 35% for a historically strong El Niño, like those that happened from 2015 to 2016, and 1997 to 1998. Odds are 62% that El Niño will persist into spring 2024.

The stronger an El Niño, the higher the likelihood of flood, drought and other regional weather consequences. This topic is relevant to environmental journalists and business journalists alike — and we’ve created this explainer to help reporters explain the consequences of this periodic weather pattern to their audiences.

Here is what this El Niño explainer will cover:  

• How weather that deviates from regular expectations can have devastating economic consequences, particularly for people working in industries like fishing and agriculture who rely on some measure of climactic predictability.
• The findings of recent research that puts average global economic losses during El Niño years in the trillions of dollars.
• The effects of climate change on El Niño, which are poised to substantially increase that tally in the decades to come, research finds.

El Niño: ‘The most predictable climate driver’

El Niño and La Niña patterns last several months to a year, though sometimes longer. A strong El Niño is often followed the next year by a La Niña pattern.

“ENSO is the most predictable climate driver at seasonal timescales,” write the authors of a June 2021 paper in the journal Environmental Hazards.

But specific weather observed during past El Niño patterns may not appear in the same way during subsequent ones. While climatologists can predict an El Niño pattern with a high level of probability, precise regional effects are less predictable.

“Every El Niño is different,” says Christopher Callahan, a postdoctoral scholar of earth system science at Stanford University. “They all have slightly different patterns, or slightly different effects.”

In order to understand how El Niño stunts global economic growth and how it hampers local and regional economies, it will help to first understand predictions for regional weather based on historical analyses of this climate pattern, especially for journalists covering and communicating its effects over the coming months.

How El Niño can affect regional weather

Past El Niño events have meant warm, dry air for Southeast Asia and northern Australia during the northern hemisphere’s winter months. Rain and cooler air appear in the southern U.S. during the winter months there.

In South America, countries situated in the northwest and along the mid-Atlantic coast have seen wetter, warmer weather. The Gulf of Alaska and western Canada have experienced warmer temperatures during past El Niño events. El Niño patterns can even alter shorelines, finds research published June 2023 in Nature Communications.

NOAA forecasters predict, as of mid-October, higher than usual temperatures in the U.S. Northwest and Northeast during the winter. Across much of the U.S. South, they predict equal odds of higher or lower temperatures. There’s a slightly greater chance of rain across the middle of the country and along the eastern seaboard, with higher chances of precipitation in the Southeast, the forecasters predict.

Climatologists and meteorologists deal in probabilities, and predictions are not certainties. Ten days is about as far as meteorologists can reliably predict when it comes to specific weather patterns. Climatologists study weather events and atmospheric patterns over the long term — anything greater than about two weeks.

“You look at these seasonal outlooks and such that are influenced by El Niño, and it might shift the odds to a 60% chance of heavy rains as opposed to the average, which might be a 33% chance,” says Emily Becker, associate director of the University of Miami Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies. “That also still means there’s a 40% chance that you won’t have those heavy rains. That’s where El Niño’s information is provided — it’s in how the chances of certain events change. It never gives you a guarantee.”

How El Niño stunts global economic growth

Recent studies indicate El Niño patterns can significantly stunt economic growth. El Niño “drives considerable impacts that include El Niño-related droughts in western Pacific regions, floods in eastern Pacific regions and severe food shortage and cyclones to Pacific Island countries,” write the authors of a May 2023 paper published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

Globally, Callahan and Mankin attribute $5.7 trillion in unrealized economic gains, measured by GDP, over the five years following the 1997-to-1998 El Niño, along with $4.1 trillion associated with the 1982-to-1983 El Niño. For some countries, like Peru, El Niño hasn’t just meant unrealized gains — overall economic growth shrunk in the following years.

Callahan and Mankin note that the 1997-to-1998 El Niño was stronger than the 1982-to-1983 El Niño, and the world economy was larger in the late 1990s than in the early 1980s.

“El Niño events can produce extreme climate conditions that range from extreme rainfall to drought, to heat, to wildfire, to landslides to disease outbreaks,” Callahan says. “All of these things appear to sort of combine and integrate, to produce economic stress that lasts for five, or even up to 10 years, making these events far more costly than we realized.”

Wenju Cai, director of southern hemisphere oceans research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, and coauthors find similar economic consequences in a September 2023 paper published in Nature Communications.

Using an analysis slightly different from Callahan and Mankin, they estimate the global economy would have been $2.1 trillion larger over the following three years if not for the 1997-to-1998 El Niño, and $3.9 trillion larger if not for the 2015-to-2016 El Niño.

La Niña can bring catastrophic rains to Southeast Asia and nearby regions, including some of the worst flooding in the history of Queensland, Australia during the 2010 La Niña. But fisheries off the Pacific coast of South America tend to do well, and some La Niña events have been shown to modestly boost global economic growth. Cai and coauthors associate the 1998-to-1999 strong La Niña with $60 billion in global economic gains.

Crucially, they also estimate that strong El Niño patterns linked to continued high emissions of greenhouse gasses could mean an additional $33 trillion in global economic losses through the end of the century.

“Greenhouse warming is likely to increase frequency and intensity of extreme El Niño events,” Cai explained by email. “An El Niño typically leads to a global economic loss in trillions of US dollars. Thus, an increase in El Niño frequency and amplitude will lead to more frequent extreme weather events that are more devastating in affected regions, and globally a greater loss in economic production, particularly in developing and emerging economies.”

Flood, drought and disease from El Niño patterns

While El Niño patterns tend to hamper the global economy, they can also be costly for local and regional economies. Take the southern U.S.: El Niño years often mean more rain than usual there, and flooding is the “most common and damaging natural disaster” in the U.S., write the authors of a July 2019 paper published in Weather, Climate and Society.

“The livelihood and socio-economic development of majority of the people in East African countries including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda largely depend on rain-fed agricultural activities,” write the authors. “The region is often affected by incidences of climate and weather extremes and is among the most flood-prone countries in Africa.”

For Zambia, a landlocked country in southern Africa, the strong 2015-to-2016 El Niño pattern brought severe drought, “which caused crops to fail shortly after planting and resulted in region-wide food deficit warnings,” write the authors of an April 2021 paper in Environment and Development Economics. 

The country particularly relies on maize for food and commerce. Since the 1990s, Zambian farmers have used sustainable land practices, such as crop rotation and soil and water conservation, according to the paper. Because El Niño patterns are generally predictable months in advance, farmers there were able to diversify production — but it wasn’t enough to make up the income from lost crops.

“We find that maize yields were substantially reduced and that household incomes were only partially protected from the shock thanks to diversification strategies,” the authors conclude. “Mechanical erosion control measures and livestock diversification emerge as the only strategies that provided yield and income benefits under weather shock.”

The results of a June 2020 paper in the journal Quaternary looks at drought data in Thailand over the past 2,000 years and finds mixed results as to whether El Niño patterns bring drought there. The authors conclude that “droughts are not a product of one climate pattern, but likely the result of numerous patterns interacting.”

Communities in the Costa Rican province of Guanacaste “suffer from recurrent droughts, often related to El Niño,” write the authors of a September 2021 paper published in Water Resources Research. El Niño-driven droughts are likely to severely reduce local water supplies, they find. The authors use hydrological modelling to estimate a 60% decline in streamflow and groundwater during an extreme El Niño pattern, with the nearby ocean temperature rising 2.5 degrees Celsius higher than usual.

La Niña, by contrast, brings intense storms to the province, which can help recharge groundwater aquifers, but are also “characterized by high sediment loads and often rush through the watersheds within hours,” the authors write.

“A key result is that with business-as-usual water use in combination with population growth and a change toward a drier climate … a decline in groundwater storage may be expected,” they conclude. “This would have substantial consequences for communities and agriculture that rely on groundwater especially during the long dry season.”

Flooding, extreme storms and fires related to El Niño patterns can make transportation difficult or impossible, with higher risks during El Niño years that roads, rail and other infrastructure could be wiped out in California, Hawaii and U.S. Pacific territories, finds research published December 2021 in Progress in Disaster Science.

Finally, El Niño patterns affect not just land and infrastructure, but have also been linked to disease outbreaks. Southeast Asia, Tanzania, the western U.S. and Brazil all saw disease outbreaks linked to the 2015-to-2016 El Niño, find the authors of a February 2019 paper in Scientific Reports. These outbreaks included plague in Colorado and New Mexico, cholera in Tanzania and dengue in Brazil.

“Extreme climate conditions, such as flooding associated with severe storms and natural disasters such as hurricanes, typhoons, or earthquakes, can disrupt water systems — exposing drinking water to waste water and other effluents — thus increasing the risk of cholera activity and other water-borne infections,” the authors write.

How climate change affects El Niño patterns

The science is settled that the world is warming at a historically fast rate due to humanity’s inventions, such as gasoline-powered vehicles and electric power.

“Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1 [degrees Celsius] above 1850 to 1900 levels in 2011 to 2020,” write the authors of a 2023 summary report for policymakers from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

While scientific consensus is not there when it comes to how climate change affects El Niño patterns, recent research explores specific links between global warming caused by humans, which is known as anthropogenic warming, and increasing variability in Pacific Ocean temperatures that fuel El Niño conditions.

The May 2023 paper in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment uses statistical modeling techniques to explore the effects of global warming on El Niño and La Niña patterns over the past 120 years — Cai is lead author.

This type of analysis is common in climate science research and is based on a complex series of computer models that simulate weather conditions. The authors acknowledge that when it comes to the intensity of El Niño and La Niña patterns, real-world data only goes back decades and is lower quality before the 1950s.

Still, they write that “determining the anthropogenic contributions to changing ENSO variability is vital to attribute causes of extreme events that are becoming more frequent and severe to understand ENSO projection and to gauge urgency of mitigation actions.” Cai also notes in an email to The Journalist’s Resource that the modeling approach used in the paper is the same as what the IPCC uses.

The authors find more than three-fourths of models show more frequent, stronger El Niño and La Niña patterns from 1961 to 2020 compared with 1901 to 1960. Taken together, the modelling results and other evidence in the paper “suggest that the increase in observed ENSO variability post-1960 is at least in part related to anthropogenic warming,” the authors write.

And it’s not just that models indicate El Niño patterns are likely becoming stronger. Global warming creates conditions that can exacerbate the effects of those patterns.

“For example, in areas where El Niño causes drought, higher air temperature due to greenhouse warming increases evaporation, so drought onset is earlier, drought is more severe, and drought is harder to get out,” Cai explained by e-mail. “In areas where El Niño causes flood, warmer air holds more water vapor, making the flood more extreme.”

The authors of another recent paper, published October 2023 in Geophysical Research Letters, examine the geologic record contained within stalagmites from southeastern Alaskan caves to analyze the core causes of El Niño patterns over millennia.

Climate in the Northeast Pacific is very influenced by water temperature in the equatorial Pacific — this is a teleconnection, a “pattern of influence,” as Callahan puts it, where a change in the atmosphere or water in one part of the world affects weather in another. The Aleutian Low, a low-pressure pattern that lingers over the Gulf of Alaska for much of the year, is stronger when the equatorial Pacific Ocean is warmer, bringing more rain than average to the southern Alaskan coast and northwestern Canada.

Stalagmites, which rise from a cave floor, and stalactites, which grow down from a cave roof, are part of the mineral deposit family known as speleothems. These deposits are “excellent at capturing atmospheric conditions over the past 3,500 years,” the authors write. Through the flow of water into and out of the cave and the natural dripping of water from cave roof to floor, the authors were able to look back in time at the existence of El Niño and La Niña patterns.

“It’s recording stable isotopes trapped in the rock, particularly Oxygen-18, which derives from precipitation,” says lead author Paul Wilcox, a postdoctoral researcher with the Innsbruck Quaternary Research Group in Austria. “Typically, we can only access that isotope by drilling small bits of powdered rock from the stalagmite, but this sample was unique in that it also contained trace amounts of water. It’s difficult to get that in a lot of records, and we were lucky enough to have samples that had enough water and grew fast enough to piece together a high-resolution record of ancient precipitation.”

Parts of the stalagmite sample with relatively high levels of Oxygen-18 indicate a weaker Aleutian Low — meaning that while that part of the stalagmite was forming, El Niño events were probably happening less frequently. Likewise, lower levels of the oxygen isotope indicate a stronger Aleutian Low, and the likely presence of more persistent El Niño patterns.

The other key part of this study has to do with solar irradiance, which is a measure of the naturally fluctuating energy from the sun that reaches the top of the earth’s atmosphere. Solar irradiance was the driving force behind El Niño and La Niña patterns for 2,000 years, until the 1970s, the authors find. They link La Niña patterns with more solar irradiance, and El Niño patterns with less solar irradiance.

Through satellite imagery and other measures, climatologists since the 1960s have known that the movement of air and water in different parts of the Pacific are not independent and random, but rather part of a larger system.

That system has changed, with connections between wind, water and atmosphere across the Pacific weakening since the 1970s. The authors point to data from the stalagmite as indicating that this change is linked to the remarkably high emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, stemming from human activity since the Industrial Revolution.

“There is a noticeable change in El Niño and La Niña variability that’s been known for several decades,” Wilcox says. “The problem is, there was too short of a record to really pinpoint if humans were causing this change or not. And this is where geologic records like the one we produced helps — kind of really more convincingly shows that this was likely human caused.”

Of the five strong El Niño events since 1901, three have happened since the 1970s, according to a September 2019 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Similar to a December 2019 paper in Geophysical Research Letters, the authors of the PNAS paper identify a westward shift since the 1970s in the “warm center” that catalyzes El Niño patterns, coinciding with “a rapid warming in the Indo-Pacific warm pool,” which they note may or may not be due entirely to human activity.

Still, if temperatures in the western Pacific continue to warm, and if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at current rates, “more frequent extreme El Niño events will induce profound socioeconomic consequences,” the authors write.

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With tornado season in the U.S. ramping up over the coming months, a recent study provides critical insight on the costs, both economic and social, of those storms — and how they can exacerbate racial segregation.

Tornadoes are more likely to damage and destroy homes, buildings and other property in counties with relatively larger Black populations, according to “Tornadoes, Poverty and Race in the USA: A Five-Decade Analysis,” published last December in the Journal of Economic Studies. That finding holds true for urban and rural counties.

In counties where tornadoes hit, the authors find the overall proportion of Black people and the proportion of people living in poverty are both slightly higher, while median income and the proportion of people with at least a bachelor’s degree are lower.

Crucially, the authors find that tornadoes can exacerbate racial segregation through two avenues: abandonment or displacement.

Abandonment — when people leave their damaged homes and resettle elsewhere — is more likely in wealthier counties. Those with the financial resources to move are likelier to be white, increasing “the prevalence of poor African Americans in those communities,” the authors write.

Displacement, meanwhile, happens when access to resources, such as homeowners’ insurance, gives some people the ability to rebuild. Lower-income Black populations are more likely to be renters and lack the financial resources to rebuild in places where tornadoes hit, making them more likely than white people to be displaced from their homes. When Black people are displaced, the population of the area hit by a tornado becomes whiter and poverty rates drop, the authors find.

“There are areas where upper middle-class whites abandoned and there are areas where upper middle-class whites rebuild — or, more likely, see buying opportunities and increase their population,” says co-author Russ Kashian, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

At the end of 2021, the home ownership rate for white people nationwide was 74%, compared with 43% for Black people, according to the Census Bureau. And there is evidence of race discrimination in insurance company payout decisions for homeowners following disasters, according to reporting from the New York Times and a May 2020 working paper from researchers at St. John’s University.

Abandonment is more likely in heavily populated areas, with displacement more common in rural areas, the authors of the current study find. Counties where people were largely displaced had an average population of 38,523. Counties where people largely abandoned their homes had an average population of 286,448.

“People with the means either do well because they’ve been able to mitigate and recover, or they leave,” says co-author Tracy Buchman, an assistant professor of occupational and environmental safety at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater who co-wrote the paper with Kashian and Robert Drago, a researcher at Precision Numerics in Springfield, Mass. “People without means end up backfilling because stuff is inexpensive now [in a devastated area], or they didn’t do well and they’re still living in an area that’s vulnerable to multiple strikes of tornado and the damage that goes with it.”

When tornadoes strike relatively wealthy counties, damages tend to be more expensive. The authors explain in the paper that although a tornado is more likely to devastate a mobile home than a brick home with a foundation, it is likewise “more expensive to replace a late-model sports car than a decade-old Ford sedan.”

“In a nutshell, the vulnerable are more likely to experience losses, the wealthy have more to lose,” says Kashian.

Consequences of extreme weather

Roughly 1,000 to 1,500 tornadoes touch down in the U.S. each year. In 2021, there were nearly 1,400 tornadoes, according to preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center.

Tornadoes can happen anywhere but are most common in “the central plains of North America, east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Appalachian Mountains,” according to NOAA, with spring and summer the most likely seasons for tornado touchdowns.

The Journal of Economic Studies paper adds insight into the economic and social consequences of severe weather. While climate change is one factor that can contribute to extreme weather, it isn’t settled science as to whether global warming correlates to more severe or more frequent tornadoes.

By contrast, hurricanes have been linked to climate change, with global warming likely to cause more severe hurricanes over the next century, according to ongoing analyses from Tom Knutson, senior scientist at NOAA.

It is difficult for meteorologists to track trends and make projections for tornadoes and thunderstorms, since they can pass quickly and often affect relatively small land areas.

Still, the Fourth National Climate Assessment from the U.S. Global Change Research Program offers that compared with “damages from other types of extreme weather, those occurring due to thunderstorm-related weather hazards have increased the most since 1980, and there is some indication that, in a warmer world, the number of days with conditions conducive to severe thunderstorm activity is likely to increase.”

Tornado intensity, damages and relief

Tornado intensity is classified along the Enhanced Fujita Scale, named for Theodore Fujita, the 20^th century meteorologist who developed it. After a tornado hits, the National Weather Service deploys a survey team to assess damage, estimate wind speeds and give the tornado an EF rating.

The least severe tornado rating — EF0 — indicates gusts between 65 mph and 85 mph.

The most severe — EF5 — indicates gusts over 200 mph.

While the recent study finds fewer tornadoes, on average, per decade since the 1970s, the cost of damages has risen substantially. During the 2010s, each tornado measuring at least an EF2 caused an average of $666,668 in inflation-adjusted damages, according to the paper. That’s up from a low of $49,492 in the 1990s and $131,976 in the 1970s.

The authors’ figures on economic damages include nearly 11,000 tornadoes covering five decades beginning in 1970. They exclude 93 outlier tornadoes with damages above $15.5 million “because we suspect that these events are both more well-publicized and receive greater attention in terms of public and private recovery efforts,” they write. Tornado location and economic damage estimates come from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters out of Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency distributes federal aid dollars following natural disasters. Other major sources of funding for immediate relief and rebuilding include private insurance and local and national nonprofits. Kashian says one takeaway is that the funds FEMA does provide could be more equitably distributed.

“What we need to say is, ‘Who needs the money?’” he says. “And, ‘What areas need investment?’ And invest in such a way that it retains the character of the neighborhood prior to the event.” 

In addition to equitable distribution, it’s an open question as to whether in the years ahead there will be a sufficient volume of federal disaster aid. A 2021 investigation from Washington Post reporters Hannah Dreier and Andrew Ba Tran exposed a system that denied disaster aid to longstanding Black families in the South, and found that overall approval rates for FEMA aid requests fell from 63% in 2010 to 13% in 2021.

Dreier and Tran report that more than one-third of the land that Black people in the South own “is passed down informally, rather than through deeds and wills.” In September 2021, FEMA announced “that it will no longer require disaster survivors living on inherited land to prove they own their homes before they can get help rebuilding,” the journalists write.

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We’re just over the hump of peak ragweed season, when tens of millions of Americans suffer sneezing, itchy eyes and coughing brought on by pollen from plants like sage and mugwort. New research in the Journal of Health Economics reveals something unexpected about allergies: U.S. cities experiencing unusually high pollen counts also experience lower rates of reported violent crime.

Looking at daily pollen counts across 16 U.S. cities from 2007 to 2016 and crimes reported to local law enforcement that the FBI collects, the authors find that reported violent crime falls 4% on high-pollen days. That drop is about the level of crime reduction that would come with a 10% increase in the size of a city’s police force, the authors write. The paper adds to past research investigating how health and other shocks — like football upsets — affect crime rates.

“Usually people look at effects of criminal justice policy, like incarceration rates and prison time,” says Monica Deza, assistant professor of economics at Hunter College and one of the paper’s authors. “Those are not the only approaches to fight crime. Not that increasing pollen or health shocks is a tool to fight crime, but it’s something to take into account.”

Past research has identified associations between violent crime and exposure to environmental toxins, like lead. Lead can change children’s brain structure, and childhood lead exposure has been associated with adult criminal behavior. Air pollution, which can also affect cognitive development in children, has also been linked to violent crime.

But pollen is not toxic to the degree that lead and air pollution are. And the reasons for the observed decrease in crime during high-pollen periods appear not to be neurological, but behavioral.

The authors focus on New York City to explore why more pollen might lead to less violent crime. Using detailed microdata they find the effect is largely due to reduced residential violent crime. Residential violent crime refers to violence that happens in the home — typically intimate partner and other domestic violence, according to the authors.

They turn to data from the bike-rental program Citibike as a proxy for outdoor activity. On high-pollen days — when pollen readings exceed 1,500 parts per million — Citibike activity declines 8%. That 1,500 ppm reading is the threshold for “high-pollen days” used throughout the paper. The average pollen count across cities during the period studied is about 172 ppm.

The authors write, “these results are consistent with the idea that individuals are more likely to remain in their homes on days in which pollen counts are high.” The behavioral change may be associated with run-of-the-mill allergy symptoms.

“Pollen makes people more fatigued, more tired,” Deza says. “The mechanism we are discussing in this paper is that if people are more fatigued and more lethargic, they may be less likely to be angry.”

High-pollen days don’t seem to lead criminals to simply put off their crimes until the air clears up. If people were committing more violent crime after pollen levels return to normal, that would mean pollen is merely making people put off criminal activity by a few days.

“But we show that the decrease in violent crime on high pollen days is not being offset by higher crime on low-pollen days,” Deza says.

Seasonal allergies can conversely be thought of as a shock to the cost of committing a violent crime, the authors write. Generally, crime rates go down when the cost of a crime goes up — for example, when there is a harsh potential legal punishment — and also when the benefits of committing a crime fall. Here’s a hypothetical the authors give:

“Consider, for example, an offender who commits assaults because of the rush that he feels in physically dominating another person. This offender may experience a reduction in the benefits of offending in the presence of an illness.”

The takeaway, Deza says, is not so much about what cities should or shouldn’t do on days when pollen is high, but rather what happens the rest of the time — particularly when environmental and other shocks lead to an uptick in violent crime. Past research has found, for example, that domestic violence rates increase 10% after professional football losses. Other research has found strong associations between violent crime and very hot weather.

“If people could manage their anger without being sick that would have positive effects on crime even on days when we don’t observe these health shocks,” Deza says.

The analysis included Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Baltimore; Bellevue, Nebraska; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit; Greenville, South Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Knoxville, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; New York; Rochester, New York; Seattle; St. Louis; and Twin Falls, Minnesota.

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As Hurricane Florence makes landfall in North Carolina, reporters who are covering the storm can expect to contend not only with the weather, but also an onslaught of mis- and disinformation.

You’ve probably seen the images before on social media – a shark swimming along a flooded highway, for example – or read seemingly credible posts about price gouging that turned out to be hoaxes.

How can you sort out what’s real and newsworthy from what’s fake? We’ve pulled together a few quick tips and resources to help:

1. Independently verify images through reverse image searches with tools like Google, RevEye or TinEye.
   • Reverse image searches allow you to upload and search an image to find other places it appears on the web. This can help verify whether images are current and accurate or old hoaxes being recirculated. Colleagues who research mis- and disinformation at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy recommend flipping the image horizontally and doing a reverse image search on that version as well.
   • We’ve summarized a few additional strategies for identifying misinformation, including checking the metadata of images to verify dates and using geolocation tools to determine where pictures were taken.
2. Review past hoaxes to know what to look out for. Storyful put together a list of debunked images from 2017’s Hurricane Irma. The Houston Chronicle, Washington Post and New York Times compiled and debunked hoaxes from Hurricane Harvey.
3. Have trustworthy sources for information, such as the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service. The National Ocean Service has information and explainers on key facts about hurricanes.

For more, check out:

• “Covering Hurricanes and Tropical Storms: Key Resources for Journalists,” created by Journalist’s Resource.
• A review of hoaxes around Hurricane Harvey, written by Nic Dias, a researcher investigating disinformation at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.
• The Poynter Institute’s “9 Tips to Avoid Spreading Misinformation About Hurricanes.”
• The National Hurricane Center’s latest forecasting for Florence.
• The News & Observer, based in Raleigh, and the Charlotte Observer — North Carolina’s biggest newspapers. They’re both providing comprehensive coverage of the storm.

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For coastal communities threatened by global warming, the challenge can be sketched with two questions: How much will the waters surge and where will the inundation be worst?

More mysterious is how rising temperatures will impact people inland. Two new papers look at climate change far from the sea and project it could radically alter global politics by the middle of the century.

In the first, Dimitri Defrance, a climate scientist at the Université Paris-Saclay, in France, looks at recent data on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Comparing these with data on the melt at the end of the last ice age, they project how the increasing flow of freshwater into the North Atlantic will negatively affect rainfall patterns in the Sahel, a vast and fertile region of Africa between the great deserts of the north and the jungles lining the Equator.

They consider, too, how the Sahel’s population is expected to balloon and how the region’s staple crops — such as sorghum and millet — depend on predictable monsoons.

Defrance and his colleagues conclude that tens if not hundreds of millions of Sahel residents are likely to flee droughts and famine. Many will head for cities near Africa’s coasts, but these too could be overwhelmed by rising sea levels. The combination, they conclude, would be catastrophic: Rapid melting in Greenland “is likely to lead to dramatic population shifts [in Africa] that would develop beyond borders and would entail irreversible demographic impacts.” Such a population shift, in other words, would have global political ramifications within decades. Think the Syrian refugee crisis — times 50 or 100.

The second study, published by a team from China and the United States led by Jianping Huang of Lanzhou University, looks at how drier parts of the planet are warming more than humid regions. By scouring global weather patterns back to 1920, they find that drier regions are experiencing temperature increases as much as 44 percent higher. Dryer places like large parts of the western United States, south Asia and Australia — which have fewer clouds to reflect heat and less moisture to curb extreme temperature fluctuations — could see increases of between 3.2 and 4 degrees Celsius in the 21^st century, even if the global average increase is kept to 2 degrees Celsius, as 195 countries agreed to target under the 2015 Paris accord on climate change. (The authors reference this 2009 study for a definition of drylands and humid regions.)

The result could be higher rates of malaria in areas where it was previously unknown, like the Great Lakes and central Russia; falling agricultural production in the American Midwest and northern China; and declining river runoff in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. Parts of Canada and northern Europe could benefit, becoming breadbaskets, but these changes are likely temporary and would, the authors reason, herald worrisome demographic swings in large parts of the globe.

Huang and his colleagues contend that allowing global average temperatures to increase by no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius would more modestly impact drylands, keeping increases to around 3 degrees Celsius. At the very least, this would be fairer, they argue: Drylands emit far less carbon than humid regions like America’s eastern seaboard, western Europe and the Chinese coast.

Bibliography:

“Consequences of Rapid Ice Sheet Melt on the Sahelian Population Vulnerability,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017; and “Drylands Face Potential Threat Under 2 degrees Celsius Global Warming Target,” in Nature Climate Change, 2017.

Other recent research:

We have reviewed research on where the seas are rising fastest, estimating future hurricane damage related to global warming, and increasingly deadly heatwaves. For more of our work on climate change, click here.

The warming planet may be causing people to sleep less, according to this 2017 paper in Science Advances.

A 2017 paper in Environmental Research Letters looks at recent record-breaking warm years and finds them not a sign that global warming is accelerating, but instead confirmation of a steady warming pattern that began in the 1970s.

Keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than 2 degrees Celsius, “would perceptibly reduce the frequency of extreme heat events in Australia,” according to this 2017 paper in Nature Climate Change.

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An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence has shown that the earth is getting hotter. As the planet warms, humans in some of the most extreme climates are struggling to adapt.

In India, heat waves have become a public health crisis in recent years, responsible for thousands of deaths. About 25 percent of the country’s population lacks access to electricity. Many more lack air conditioning, a factor that researchers associate with death during a heat wave. In May 2016, for example, the city of Jaisalmer reached 52.4°C (126.3°F); nationwide, about 700 people died that month due to heat stress, according to the Indian Meteorological Department.

Between 1960 and 2009, average temperatures in India rose by about 0.5°C (or 0.9° on the Fahrenheit scale). Forecasters say the heat will keep rising: By the end of this century, average temperatures in India are expected to climb between 2.5°C and 5.5°C over what they were in 1960.

A new paper looks at the increasing rates of mortality. “Future climate warming could have a relatively drastic human toll in India and similarly in developing tropical and subtropical countries,” the authors write.

An academic study worth reading: “Increasing Probability of Mortality During Indian Heat Waves,” in Science Advances, 2017.

Study summary: Omid Mazdiyasni of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues compare temperature and heat-related mortality data in India going back to 1960. They define a heat wave as a “three or more consecutive days of temperatures above the 85th percentile” of the hottest monthly temperature in a specific location and a mass heat-related mortality as the related deaths of more than 100 people. Both have increased in frequency. Mazdiyasni and his colleagues also review literature showing how heat stress can exacerbate many life-threatening ailments, including heart disease and respiratory problems.

They acknowledge that mass heat-related deaths do not hit every region equally. Some areas are more prone to poverty, where access to air conditioning and health care is worse. These areas are likely to have higher mortality rates during a heat wave.

Key takeaways:

• By 2009, India was 146 percent more likely to experience a heat-related mass mortality event than it was in 1960.
• The probability of such an event increases 78 percent when a heat wave increases from 6 to 8 days.
• Southern and western India saw 50 percent more heat waves during the years 1985 to 2009 than they had in the previous 25 years.
• The rest of the country saw heat waves increase in frequency by about 25 percent.

Helpful resources:

• NASA explains “why a half-degree temperature rise is a big deal,” in this 2016 post.
• Data on the annual summer monsoons in South Asia are available dating back to 1871 from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
• The India Climate Dialogue, a website sponsored by the U.S. nonprofit Internews, reports “impartial and objective news and views on all aspects of climate change, how it affects India, and what can be done about it.”
• The Council on Foreign Relations examines how India has responded to President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord.

Other research:

• This 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charts the “substantial” increase in the number of droughts and heat waves that happen concurrently in the U.S.
• The risk of deadly heatwaves is growing in most countries, according to this 2017 review of decades of research in Nature Climate Change.
• Several other papers look at heat waves and climate change projections in India.
• We have written extensively on climate change, highlighting projections of future hurricane damage in the U.S., arctic ice melt and trade, predicting where the seas are rising fastest, environmental regulations, and the gender stereotypes about “going green.”

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The year 2016 was the hottest ever recorded, marking the third consecutive year of record warm temperatures on the Earth’s surface, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. Of the 17 hottest years in history, 16 have been since 2000. Scientists are unequivocal: we humans are behind global warming.

As a result, polar ice is melting and the seas are rising faster than at any time in at least 2,800 years. The sea level has climbed by up to nine inches since 1880 and by three inches since 1993, according to research published in Nature.

For Americans living near the coasts and wondering how long before their homes are inundated, a new NOAA report — released on the last day of Barack Obama’s administration — offers region-specific predictions to help them prepare.

A report worth reading: “Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States,” published by NOAA on January 19, 2017.

Ocean currents can influence how much the sea is rising in different places. The shifting weight of the seas as polar ice melts can reshape the earth’s crust, change the planet’s gravitational field and rotation, and the shape of the ocean basin. All this affects how we measure what scientists call “gridded relative sea level,” or RSL, and explains why some regions are more vulnerable to rising seas than others.

“The ocean is not rising like water would in a bathtub,” lead author William Sweet of NOAA said in a press release announcing the 75-page report. “For example, in some scenarios sea levels in the Pacific Northwest are expected to rise slower than the global average, but in the Northeast they are expected to rise faster.”

NOAA created six models for each of the next eight decades, or until the year 2100, and projected them onto sections of coastline about 70 miles long. That allows policymakers in different regions to use the same models. The models — called low, intermediate-low, intermediate, intermediate-high, high and extreme — correspond to sea level rises of 0.3, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5 meters respectively (approximately 1 to 8 feet).

Key takeaways:

• The authors expect the global average sea level to rise at least 0.3 meters (about 1 foot) by 2100.
• A sea level rise of 2 to 2.7 meters by 2100, due to rapid Antarctic and Greenland ice melt, “may be more likely than previously thought.”
• A sea level rise of 0.9 meters would permanently flood areas home to 2 million Americans; 1.8 meters would permanently inundate areas home to 6 million.
• Under the likeliest scenarios, 90 major coastal cities like New York and Miami will see the chance of annual disruptive flooding (moderate floods that present “serious risk to life and property”) grow 25 times by 2080.
• From Virginia to Maine and in the western Gulf of Mexico, the rise in RSL is projected to be greater than the global average in almost all scenarios.
• In the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, the rise in RSL is projected to be less than the global average in the low-to-intermediate scenarios.
• Along almost all the coasts in the continental United States, the rise in RSL is projected to be higher than the global average under the three worst-case scenarios.

The report is available on the NOAA website. We have also archived it here.

Helpful resources:

The Pentagon in 2016 used methods similar to NOAA’s to assess sea level changes near military installations around the world.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) examines and reports on the scientific research related to climate change. We profiled its 2014 report on “impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.”

NOAA publishes extensive data on weather and global warming in general, as well as more specific tools like maps that visualize coastal flooding related to rising seas.

A list of other government data sources on climate change is available here.

The federal government’s subsidized flood insurance program encourages residents to rebuild in areas affected by rising seas. Over the years, the program has spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, often in areas certain to be inundated again. The New York Times reported in 2012 on how the program has helped Dauphin Island in Alabama, one of the nation’s most vulnerable areas, rebuild over and over.

Other research: 

Our 2016 research roundup examines climate change-related risks and the regions and demographic groups most threatened by them.

A 2016 study by Pew Research Center looks at how politicized the debate over climate science has become in America.

New York City can expect many more floods, according to this 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The issue: With the rising seas lashing America’s coasts, how residents react is a growing area of interest. Man-made global warming threatens to inundate coastal areas of the United States, home to 40 percent of the country’s population. Local and federal governments say they need billions of dollars to prepare critical infrastructure, such as drainage pipes and roads.

Reporters covering hurricanes often describe damage and the rebuilding process. Yet slow demographic and population changes also impact long-term policy and government spending.

How do people living in these areas assess their options? A new paper looks at the Gulf Coast across 35 years.

An academic study worth reading: “Trapped in Place? Segmented Resilience to Hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, 1970–2005,” published in Demography, August 2016.

Study summary: This study, led by John Logan of Brown University, looks at which residents affected by hurricanes in the southern United States are likelier to move during the three years following a major hurricane. The authors ask whether some demographic groups are more “resilient” than others — meaning they are either able to stay behind after a devastating storm and thrive, or have the means to uproot and plant themselves elsewhere. Logan and his colleagues call this movement “segmented withdrawal.”

The authors use National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data to estimate damage from all hurricanes to hit the Gulf Coast between 1970 and 2005 — both major wind damage and flooding from storm surges. With census data, they look at 476 counties within 200 miles of the coast in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and the Florida panhandle — areas that were home to over 26 million people in 2005.

They compare two risk factors: proximity to coast (“locational vulnerability”) and capacity to deal with disaster (“social vulnerability”). Often it is “minorities, elders, and low-income groups,” the authors hypothesize, who are most hazard-prone and least able to move. After Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, for example, the poorest were less able to evacuate because of a lack of transportation.

Though this paper does not specifically address global warming, rising seas are deluging the same coastal communities affected by hurricanes.

Findings:

• White people are more likely than black people to leave when their communities face major damage from flooding and high winds. The damage leads to a reduction of the black population over three years by 0.5 percent; of the white population by 1.1 percent — twice as much. This outflow continues for three years after a storm.

• Overall, major hurricane damage and storm surge reduces a county’s population by about 1 percent over the three-year period, with departures continuing into the third year after a storm.

• The elderly are less likely to move from high-risk areas than young people. Over three years, after a storm causing substantial wind damage and flooding, there is a 1.6 percent decline in a county’s young population, but only a 0.4 percent decline in its elderly population. “Our view is not that the elderly are more resilient, but that they are more vulnerable: they are more rooted in place and have more difficulty arranging a move.”

• The poor are less likely to leave. In the first year after a destructive hurricane, there was a 0.8 percent population decline in a county with low rates of poverty. By contrast, the authors found a 0.12 percent population increase in a high-poverty county. Over three years, low-poverty counties saw a 2.04 percent population decline while high-poverty counties saw a 0.44 percent population increase. The authors suggest future research may explain these tendencies.

• These poverty findings cut across race: “Both blacks and whites appear to be more likely to remain in place after hurricanes in poorer counties but to leave more affluent counties.”

• Poorer communities bear the brunt of both damage and woe after a storm because they are less likely to have insurance, have less access to decision makers, and are more likely to live in poorly constructed (“most subject to damage”) homes. “People who remain [during or after a hurricane] in the face of risk may simply be trapped in place.”

• There were no signs that departures from one county boosted the population of a neighboring county — i.e. no signs that neighboring counties take in the displaced.

• In the 1950s, wealthier people and white residents tended to live in higher-risk areas closer to the coast; the areas were considered more desirable because of their proximity to water. But a shift occurred. By 2000, blacks “became more exposed” to these risks than whites. And by 2010, the wealthier were less likely to live in high-risk areas than the poor were.

• Overall, despite the population reductions described here, the Gulf region as a whole saw 80 percent population growth over the period studied.

Other resources:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a U.S. government agency, has extensive data on weather and global warming in general, as well as more specific tools like maps that visualize coastal flooding related to rising seas.

A list of other government data sources is available here.

The federal government’s subsidized flood insurance program encourages residents to rebuild in areas hit by hurricanes. Over the years, the program has spent tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, often in areas sure to be hit again in the future. The New York Times reported in 2012 on how the program has helped Dauphin Island in Alabama, one of the nation’s most vulnerable areas, rebuild over and over. 

Journalist’s Resource has a tip sheet on covering hurricanes that includes lists of resources available in emergencies.

Other research:

A research roundup by Journalist’s Resource focuses on global warming’s impact on coastal American cities.

We have also profiled research on flood trends, crime and access to credit following natural disasters and recovery after major storms like Hurricane Sandy.

Keywords: weather, storms, moving, preparedness, oceans, sea level rise, disaster, migration, Hurricane Katrina, Gilbert, Elena, Allen, Andrew, Ivan

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Hurricane season in the U.S. generally runs from late spring to late fall. In the Atlantic basin, which encompasses the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, most hurricanes occur between June 1 and Nov. 30. Hurricane season for the Eastern Pacific basin, which includes the waters off the nation’s west coast, lasts from May 15 to Nov. 30.

News outlets across the country — especially those in coastline communities — monitor the weather closely during this period, keeping an eye out for tropical storm watches and hurricane warnings. While tropical storms are milder than hurricanes, they are dangerous because they can cause flooding, knock down trees and power lines and wash out roads and bridges. Hurricanes can be catastrophic, destroying homes and businesses and leaving some areas flooded and without power for days to months. For example, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was responsible for more than 1,800 deaths and an estimated $151 billion in damages, according to a 2015 report from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Journalists role is critical when it comes to reporting on tropical storms and hurricanes. The public relies on news reports for the most up-to-date weather information as well as guidance on how to prepare and when to start preparing for dangerous conditions. In the midst of weather-related emergencies, government agencies look to news organizations for help quickly distributing details about evacuations, school closures, shelters, medical care, transportation, food and clean water.

Reporters who write about weather as part of their beats and even those who only pitch in on such stories occasionally should familiarize themselves with emergency-management procedures in their cities, counties and states. They also should know which local and national organizations monitor weather patterns and issue warnings and advisories. It is a good idea to identify key sources, including media liaisons and press officers, and to establish relationships with these individuals before they are needed.

To help journalists cover this important topic, Journalist’s Resource has compiled a list of reports, tip sheets, research studies and other resources that should be useful to media professionals of various experience levels.

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Understanding weather terms, concepts

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) has put together a glossary of terms related to hurricanes as well as a list of weather-related acronyms.

The NHC also has created an easy-to-understand chart describing the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, a 1-to-5 rating system that is based on a hurricane’s sustained wind speed and is used to estimate potential property damage. This scale can help journalists differentiate between Category 3 and Category 5 hurricanes.

The center’s website offers a detailed explainer on storm surges, which can cause extensive damage.

Historical context

The NHC has compiled data on major hurricanes since 1900, with details such as death tolls, local economic impacts and interactive maps for each hurricane.

A free online tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) allows you to enter a zip code and access more than 150 years of Atlantic hurricane tracking data for a specific area.

The U.S. Census Bureau has gathered data and reports related to Hurricane Katrina, the deadliest U.S. hurricane since 1928.

A 2006 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Journal of Safety Research looks at non-fatal injuries among residents and relief workers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Building weather maps

Storybench, part of the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, offers step-by-step instructions on using the online mapping tool CartDB in a guide titled “How to Build a Weather Map in CartoDB.”

Tools for authenticating photos and videos

Before, during and after big storms, people will share lots of photos and videos on social media. Some will be so compelling, reporters will want to use them in their coverage. Beware of altered images as well as photos and videos that capture actual scenes — but from a different time or place.

To check a photo, use a tool like the RevEye Reverse Image Search, which searches Google, Bing, Yandex, TinEye and Baidu for other copies of the image. Use YouTube DataViewer to get information about videos hosted on YouTube, including exact upload time.

Tips on writing weather stories

“How to Build a Better Weather Story: Tips for Reporting Before, During and After the Storm”

This guide from Investigative Reporters & Editors highlights important steps to covering hurricanes and storms.

“Writing the Weather Story: A Step-by-Step Guide”

This explainer from Mark Leccese, a journalism professor at Emerson College, appears on Boston.com.

“Weather Reporting as Beat Journalism”

Scott Libin, a former news director at WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, wrote this tip sheet for The Poynter Institute.

“Tragedies & Journalists”

This 40-page guide from the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia Journalism School is aimed at helping reporters improve their coverage of natural disasters and other tragedies.

Federal agency resources

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

NOAA, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, monitors hurricanes as they form and works with various agencies to help communities prepare for dangerous weather. Each year, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center offers hurricane-season predictions for the Atlantic, eastern Pacific and central Pacific basins.

National Hurricane Center (NHC)

This is a division of NOAA that focuses on hurricanes. Its website offers a host of resources that can be helpful to journalists, including five-day weather outlooks, satellite images and a latitude-longitude distance calculator.

National Weather Service

Also affiliated with NOAA, this agency’s mission is to “provide weather, water, and climate data, forecasts and warnings for the protection of life and property and enhancement of the national economy.” It has 122 weather forecast offices located throughout the U.S. Annually, it issues about 1.5 million forecasts and 50,000 weather-related warnings.

Ready.gov

This government website offers information about how the public should react when the National Weather Service issues an alert for a hurricane watch or warning. It offers, among other things, tips on what to do when a hurricane is 36 hours from arriving and when a hurricane is just six hours away.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

The CDC website offers guidance on preparing for hurricanes, including collecting supplies, getting the family car ready and determining whether or not to evacuate.

Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA)

FEMA, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, helps coordinate government responses to national disasters, including major hurricanes.

U.S. Department of State

The federal agency’s website warns travelers of the dangers of visiting parts of the world that often experience hurricanes and other dangerous weather conditions. It includes a chart of storm seasons across the globe.

A sampling of hurricane-related research studies

“Potential Increases in Hurricane Damage in the United States: Implications for the Federal Budget”
Dinan, Terry; et al. Working paper prepared for the Congressional Budget Office, June 2016.

Summary: “Damage from hurricanes is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades because of the effects of climate change and coastal development. In turn, potential requests for federal relief and recovery efforts will increase as well. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the magnitude of the increases in hurricane damage and the associated amounts of federal aid if historical patterns hold. In addition, CBO examined three approaches to reducing the amount of such federal assistance: limiting greenhouse gas emissions; shifting more costs to state and local governments and private entities, thereby reducing coastal development; and investing in structural changes to reduce vulnerability to hurricanes. The accompanying working paper provides a detailed discussion of the data and methodology CBO used to estimate hurricane damage.”

“Danger and Dementia: Caregiver Experiences and Shifting Social Roles During a Highly Active Hurricane Season”
Christensen, Janelle J.; Castañeda, Heide. Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 2014, Vol. 57. doi: 10.1080/01634372.2014.898009.

Abstract: “This study examined disaster preparedness and decision-making by caregivers of community-dwelling persons diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or a related dementia (ADRD). Interviews were conducted with 20 caregivers in South Florida. Twelve of these interviews include caregiving experiences during the highly active 2004–2005 hurricane seasons. Results indicate that persons in earlier stages of ADRD can, and often do, remain engaged in the disaster preparation and planning process. However, during the early stages, persons may also resist evacuation, even if the caregiver felt it was necessary. During later stages of the disease, caregivers reported less resistance to disaster-related decisions, however, with the trade-off of less ability to assist with preparation.”

“Who Leaves and Who Stays? A Review and Statistical Meta-Analysis of Hurricane Evacuation Studies”
Huang, Shih-Kai; Lindel, Michael K.; Prater, Carla S. Environment and Behavior, 2015. doi: 10.1177/0013916515578485.

Abstract: “This statistical meta-analysis (SMA) examined 38 studies involving actual responses to hurricane warnings and 11 studies involving expected responses to hypothetical hurricane scenarios conducted since 1991. The results indicate official warnings, mobile home residence, risk area residence, observations of environmental (storm conditions) and social (other people’s behavior) cues, and expectations of severe personal impacts, all have consistently significant effects on household evacuation. Other variables — especially demographic variables — have weaker effects on evacuation, perhaps via indirect effects. Finally, the SMA also indicates that the effect sizes from actual hurricane evacuation studies are similar to those from studies of hypothetical hurricane scenarios for 10 of 17 variables that were examined. These results can be used to guide the design of hurricane evacuation transportation analyses and emergency managers’ warning programs. They also suggest that laboratory and internet experiments could be used to examine people’s cognitive processing of different types of hurricane warning messages.”

“Evacuation During Hurricane Sandy: Data from a Rapid Community Assessment”
Brown, Shakara; Parton, Hilary; Driver, Cynthia; Norman, Christina. PLoS Currents, 2016. doi: 10.1371/currents.dis.692664b92af52a3b506483b8550d6368.

Summary: “In anticipation of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, New York City officials issued mandatory evacuation orders for evacuation Zone A. However, only a small proportion of residents complied. Failure to comply with evacuation warnings can result in severe consequences including injury and death. To better ascertain why individuals failed to heed pre-emptive evacuation warnings for Hurricane Sandy, we assessed factors that may have affected evacuation among residents in neighborhoods severely affected by the storm.”

“The Economic Impact of Hurricane Katrina on its Victims: Evidence from Individual Tax Returns”
Deryugina, Tatyana; Kawano, Laura; Levitt, Steven. Working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, November 2014. doi: 10.3386/w20713.

Abstract: “Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 200,000 homes and led to massive economic and physical dislocation. Using a panel of tax return data, we provide one of the first comprehensive analyses of the hurricane’s long-term economic impact on its victims. Katrina had large and persistent impacts on where people live; small and mostly transitory impacts on wage income, employment, total income, and marriage; and no impact on divorce or fertility. Within just a few years, Katrina victims’ incomes fully recover and even surpass that of controls from similar cities that were unaffected by the storm. The strong economic performance of Katrina victims is particularly remarkable given that the hurricane struck with essentially no warning. Our results suggest that, at least in this particular disaster, aid to cover destroyed assets and short-run income declines was sufficient to make victims financially whole. Our results provide some optimism regarding the costs of climate-change driven dislocation, especially when adverse events can be anticipated well in advance.”

Journalist’s Resource thanks David Beard, a research fellow at the Shorenstein Center and former digital news executive at the Washington Post and Boston Globe, for his help creating this tip sheet.

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Juliette Kayyem is a national leader in homeland security and crisis management. When she served as President Obama’s assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, she played a key role in the government’s response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Previously, she had been the homeland security adviser to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

Today, Kayyem owns Juliette Kayyem Solutions, a Massachusetts-based consulting and analysis company, and lectures on public policy as part of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She’s also a national security, intelligence and terrorism analyst for CNN. In 2015, she launched a new podcast, “Security Mom,” for WBGH News in Boston. Her new book, Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home, is scheduled for release in 2016.

As part of Journalist’s Resource’s ongoing “research chat” series, we recently sat down with Kayyem to ask her about the media’s role in covering crises such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks. During the interview, she offered us insights on how U.S. governments handle emergencies. She also gave us a number of tips on how journalists can do a better job covering these high-profile events, including taking a more critical view of government’s actions and decisions.

Some key takeaways for journalists:

• Familiarize yourself with the federal government’s Incident Command System (ICS) and that of your local and state governments. An ICS is a hierarchical management system that allows governments to respond to emergencies through the coordination of various agencies, personnel, equipment and facilities. Being familiar with these systems will help you understand what you are observing when you are in the field covering an emergency. Knowing how these systems are set up and work also will help you spot potential problems and ask more probing questions.
• Develop relationships with officials who oversee emergency management before an emergency occurs. And those relationships should extend beyond police and fire departments. Often, the top-level officials who coordinate emergency responses will not be law-enforcement officers or firefighters.
• Read case studies. Government leaders read case studies to understand the dynamics of emergencies that already have occurred and to scrutinize governments’ past responses to those emergencies. A good resource is the book Managing Crises: Responses to Large-Scale Emergencies, edited by Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. Leonard.
• Review local governments’ emergency-management plans to understand their individual roles better. This will give you a chance to identify potential problems and ask questions before an emergency occurs. It is a good idea to also sit in on some of the regular meetings that government officials hold to discuss and fine-tune their emergency-management plans. Ask to be allowed to observe simulations.
• Be cautious about acting on or reporting about assumptions. Journalists who are under intense pressure to get information quickly sometimes make assumptions and present them as facts. Not only can this mislead your audience and hurt your professional reputation, but it also could have unintended consequences in terms of audience reactions to the bad information.

Denise-Marie Ordway of Journalist’s Resource spoke with Kayyem. The following is an edited transcript:

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Journalist’s Resource: As you know, journalists often are among the first responders to the scene of a tragedy, whether it’s a major accident, a terrorist attack or a natural disaster such as a tornado or earthquake.  Can you share your thoughts about this and help us understand government and emergency officials’ perspective? For example, are journalists seen as a help or a hindrance in this respect?

Juliette Kayyem: I always begin with the story that circulates in emergency-management circles: When you get the phone call at 3 o’clock in the morning, go back to sleep. The joke is because in 15 minutes, the news you heard will either be proven false or you will have needed those 15 minutes to regroup and then go out and deal with the disaster. In other words, disasters are called disasters for a reason. They unfold in organized ways in a lot of circumstances, but also require a lot of pivoting by first responders. So the lack of clarity to a journalist looking at it does not mean that there is a lack of clarity.

So one of the first things that I always recommend to journalists is to familiarize yourself with the basic attributes of disaster management. It’s something called Incident Command System, or ICS, if I can recommend it. You can just go online and I think there is an “ICS for non-first responders.” It just explains how an incident-command structure looks so that when you come to the disaster, it may look like a bunch of parallel things going on, but they’re actually managed through quite a hierarchical system run by an incident commander. And when the incident commander is weak like in Hurricane Katrina, that’s when you see the system fall apart.

I think there has been a tremendous change in disaster management vis-à-vis journalists, mostly because of the feeling that what you can’t beat, you better join. I think because of the onslaught of Twitter and Facebook and, you know, no one really waits for the press conferences anymore, I think people in my field are much more receptive to the power of the media to get information out. To protect people, which is of primary importance, but also to describe what is going on. So I think that there has been a change and so people in the field now are much more receptive. Now look, there are still those traditional cops who are like “Ah, I hate the media.” But, for the most part, I think people have come to accept the need to engage the media because bad information on Twitter or wherever else can actually risk lives.

JR: At Harvard, you teach graduate students who will be new leaders in the areas of emergency management and homeland security. What do you tell them about working with the media?

Juliette Kayyem:  I talk to them mostly about mistakes because I think that’s the only way you can have lessons learned. I think, in some ways, there is a philosophical challenge between the media wanting to focus on the bad and disaster management being about trying to minimize the bad. So there is always going to be a disconnect because, obviously, there is going to be bad news. It’s a fricking disaster. There’s no good news here – at least not for a while. I was director of incident command for the BP oil spill and I look back at that now and I think, operationally, it wasn’t ideal. I think we did pretty good. I mean, I like to say we saved an ocean. And the fact that we don’t talk about the BP oil spill anymore was success. I think on the media side, though, we failed in setting the conditions of success. I think we failed affirmatively and then we failed by omission.

Affirmatively, I think we — the government, the Obama administration — made it sound like we were doing so much that we were in control of this disaster. Well, you know we had 29 days between the time the rig went down and the time oil hit shore. Anyone who has worked with oil and water knows to dream on if you think you’re going to capture everything. So we, unfortunately, set the criteria of success as no oil on shore – no oil on shore is failure, instead of [saying] “Look, everyone, oil is going to hit shore because anyone who mixes oil and water knows it’s impossible to get oil out.” So our standard of success is less oil hitting shore than would have but for our effort. It’s really hard to set the conditions of success that way because we like binary. In a disaster, it’s not binary. If there’s anything to learn it is to educate or at least try to amplify what the conditions of success are. You know,  in my field,  let’s just be honest here – it’s totally legitimate to say only 3,000 people died in the Twin Towers when you think there might have been 47,000 people there on any given Tuesday morning. You can’t say that, right? Because, of course, it’s a tragedy that 3,000 people died. But in a world in which fewer people dying, less oil hitting shore is success, we’ve got to learn to communicate that better. And my field is bad at that.

JR: What websites, blogs, journals or other resources would you recommend to journalists who write about emergency management as part of their beat or who are required to write about a tragic event on occasion?

Juliette Kayyem: People don’t realize disaster management is a policy and it’s called the Incident Command System or NIMS, which is the National Incident Management System. But, basically, if you type up “Incident Command System,” I think you can take an online tutorial for like an hour and it’s free.  FEMA gives them for free. You can just figure out, “Oh wait, what does a disaster look like? What does this system look like?” In short, the Incident Command System is a hierarchical system run by an incident commander who may be a cop, but may be a fire chief, may be an emergency manager. And it’s a way of organizing all the pieces of a disaster. They’re called  … you know, like housing, transportation, public health, sheltering — all the different pieces that you’re going to want to focus on in a disaster. They’re called Emergency Support Functions. It just describes sort of how this hierarchical system folds out so that when someone comes to a disaster and they see a bunch of people who look like they’re not doing anything, they may be the people running finance, which is really important in a disaster. You need to move money fast. So the fact that it looks like they’re just on phones or they’re waiting for something — it means nothing. So get yourself familiar with the system.

The other thing is I think most people view homeland security at large as simply TSA [Transportation Security Administration]. And that’s not good. So there are a number of guides to what is homeland security. The National Governors Association has written a new governors’ guide to homeland security that sort of lays out every piece of homeland security because it’s such a big docket. And it’s something to look at to just sort of see, from the states’ side, what it looks like. And then on the federal side, the Department of Homeland Security has written QHSR — Quad Homeland Security Review — policy and it sort of lays out the pieces that the department touches. Now those are all government resources, but at least it will give reporters some understanding of how the system works. Doesn’t mean it works every time, but that’s essentially it.

JR: Do you draw on academic materials?

Juliette Kayyem:  The academic literature is just starting to be a more rigorous academic discipline in the homeland security field. But it’s not there yet. There are not a lot of books solely on disaster management. So what I often rely on are case studies. The [Harvard] Kennedy School and other schools have great case study programs. I think [for] leadership and disasters, understanding disaster, you just have to look at old disasters. What happened with the tsunamis, what actually happened with Hurricane Katrina? Arnold Howitt and Dutch Leonard have a great book of case studies of disasters. They don’t really answer the tough questions. They just sort of lay out all of the dynamics that were happening that explain why some things weren’t working and others were and some of the challenges for leadership. So that’s another thing that I recommend. For me, it’s always the case studies.

JR: As someone who has spent many years organizing government responses to major crises in both state and federal government, I’m sure you’ve made observations about what journalists generally do well and what they generally don’t do well when covering such issues. Can you share some examples of what journalists don’t usually do well and how they might do things better?

Juliette Kayyem: I think I don’t have the journalist gene even though I was a columnist. Like this desire to be first — I just don’t get. Because I believe it will inevitably be wrong or it will screw up in some way. I kind of feel like: “Why does it matter?” But that’s just me.  I work for CNN and they obviously feel otherwise. During the Boston Marathon, I was on air with John King when he falsely stated an arrest had been made. Now I knew an arrest had not been made because I’d been in major cities where an arrest had been made and it did not feel like it. You know, when a major arrest has been made, there are helicopters everywhere and everything. I said on air: “I’m not so sure about this.” That was really hard to do. But I think that sort of stands as a perfect example in which a mayor or a leader will talk in a certain way. [Mayor] Menino was simply suggesting we knew who the guys were. In other words, we had their pictures. We had no idea who they actually were. That was mistranslated. So I would say to journalists: Are you speaking the same language as the person who’s talking to you? When a mayor or someone says “We know who they are,” what does that actually mean? You say you think you know what it means. So that really hurt a company that has been very good to me, a media company that’s been very good to me — a media company that, whatever its flaws, people turn to CNN. They want it to be right.

When reporters stick with the story, I think it’s really important. These disasters … the BP oil spill was an odd example because it was so long term. It was 100 days. But going back and seeing, you know, what does resiliency look like and what actually was the story there? Those are all really important. Or sticking around. The reporters that stick around past the limelight are the ones who I think get the most honest stories.

JR: What about things they do well? Does anything stand out? A particular news agency or scenario?

Juliette Kayyem:  You know, it’s going to be so case specific. Long form for disaster – long form is always so interesting. Magazine articles or books on Hurricane Katrina or even novels that relate it. A lot of documentaries do it well because they get the nuance of the disaster. The daily reporting – generally, it is good. I just think it’s just so over the top. Not everything is breaking news – let’s just put it that way.

JR: In times of tragedy – especially immediately after tragedy has struck — journalists and government officials usually are working in an environment filled with stress and uncertainty. Can you offer some tips to help journalists work better with emergency officials and government officials to get accurate and up-to-date information?

Juliette Kayyem:  Well I mean, look, there is going to be the formal joint-information command system through which they are going to be getting information. I think trying to be paired with emergency managers — not even the head person, but someone else who is going out in the field — just to see how it works. I think understanding that government never would view itself as being the sole first responder. I often tell journalists coming to disasters: “Do you know how many people work at FEMA?” And they are always off by multiples of thousands. It’s 2,700 people. FEMA is an organizing entity that brings together all the different stakeholders at a disaster, including private sector — like a Walmart or nonprofits, like churches, synagogues, others. So a lot of times, I think reporters can think ‘government’ or ‘not government’ and think that there’s a gap or a tension. I think one way is to go out and see that government can create the web where others engage. It doesn’t mean they’re in conflict. It means, actually, that they are working together or that they are trying to work together.

So I think that can only be seen out in the field. That means not just sticking around government. How are non-governmental entities engaging in the disaster and the response?  How are individuals engaging in the response and then also the private sector? What Walmart did during Hurricane Katrina that FEMA couldn’t was just absolutely remarkable. You know, it’s often viewed as “Walmart came to the rescue.” I don’t think Walmart saw it that way. I think Walmart thought: “Government needs our help. We’re going to engage in this enterprise to try to save people.” So I think that that’s an interesting way to see these dynamics.

JR: You recommend that journalists pair up with officials from emergency management to learn how things are done. Should that happen before tragedy occurs?

Juliette Kayyem: Before hurricane season, if you’re a local journalist, don’t wait to go to the bunker of the emergency-management agency. Ask: “Can I go through a walk through?” and “How are you gearing up for this?” Ask to sit in on a table top. Government agencies with NGOs [Non-Government Organizations] and private-sector partners constantly are exercising, doing simulations, exercises — what we call table tops. Ask to sit in there — no attribution. Just to get a sense of “Oh my gosh, how would this actually work?” And get a sense of the gaps in the planning. And so, have a strong working relationship with the emergency-management apparatus as compared to the police officers. Because very few disasters are going to be cop-run. In fact, in natural disasters, they are going to be part of public safety and security. They’re [law enforcement] not going to be in charge. So make sure that reporters access the right piece of the apparatus.  And, for example, if you are in a maritime community, get with the Coast Guard. Because chances are if you’re going to have a maritime disaster, Coast Guard will be lead.

JR: How difficult would it be for a journalist to get that kind of access?

Juliette Kayyem:  I think in a non-disaster relationship — if you show good-faith interest — relatively easy. Because for the most part, our jobs are waiting and they’re exercising and planning and figuring out budgets and getting people trained. So if someone is interested during those gap times, then people are thrilled. Because then what happens, after a bad thing happens, it’s a freaking disaster and everyone knows it’s bad. There are only bad stories. And the incident command officer is there saying: “Where the heck were all of you when we were saying, ‘If something bad happens, here’s how it’s going to work?’” You know? And so I think we need to explain what the apparatus looks like.

JR: There has been a lot of discussion about how Mexico, in October 2015, was able to escape the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere with no deaths. Some say the country escaped serious tragedy because it had prepared well for Hurricane Patricia. Can you talk about the role of journalists in emergency preparedness? Does the news media do a good job preparing communities for the kinds of disasters for which you can prepare on some level?

Juliette Kayyem: It’s the government’s responsibility to engage people — utilizing the media, but preparing them [people] for the things that they can actually do. I’m very critical of my apparatus. You know, we spent 15 years talking in a way that either made people freak out or tune out — one or the other, and nothing in between. And I think it’s really, really important that we empower people with the tools necessary. And I think journalists can amplify that. I think the Mexico hurricane — or non-hurricane– is the perfect example. That was a reaction guided by science. And if the science changes, who cares? “Thank God” is all I have to say. Everything went well with that. People were going to die if the weather didn’t change. I think the way that the media amplified it was really important because I think it just told people there’s no messing around here.

JR: Are journalists asking the right questions when it comes to emergency-preparedness issues?

Juliette Kayyem:  The best question to ask is: “What is success, what’s the standard of success?” Because in a disaster, it’s hard to judge. And then begin to think about it. An incident commander will have that answer. Our first priority is to get the roads open. They’re going to have a list of successes. Part of it is having the journalists understand the standards of success, knowing we start from a bad-news story.

JR: What can they be doing to better hold these agencies accountable?

Juliette Kayyem:  Hold them to the standard of success. A journalist can’t come into a disaster and think: “Well, this is a mess. It’s bad, and they’re not doing their job.” Yes, it’s bad. This is not a Disney cruise. This is really bad stuff happening. So holding government accountable to the delivery of services, to the training and practices that they hold themselves to is really important. But they [journalists] have to know those things first. That’s why you have to educate yourself beforehand. And I think the apparatus is very receptive to that.

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Other resources: A May 2015 report from the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia University, “Covering Natural Disaster in Nepal,” offers insights into the challenges of covering earthquakes in Nepal. The Dart Center also offers a 40-page guide for reporters, titled “Tragedies & Journalists: A Guide for More Effective Coverage.” The International Center for Journalists’ guide “Disaster and Crisis Coverage” also provides important insights and tips.

Keywords: terrorism, disaster, Hurricane Katrina, BP oil spill, Deepwater Horizon, trauma

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