Atmospheric rivers and other adverse weather events are likely to get more intense with each passing year.
Atmospheric rivers—narrow cloud bands carrying concentrated moisture—aren’t necessarily bad per se. Marty Ralph, a meteorologist and director of theat the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, told The Daily Beast that ARs are relatively common and even have a positive impact by providing water to drought-stricken regions like California.
This is an area where we can kill two birds with one environmentally-conscious stone: green infrastructure, or civic engineering design and systems that help filter and absorb rainwater, where it can be efficiently reused or stored. This can come in a wide range of different forms ranging from personal rain barrels against your home, to resurfacing city streets with permeable pavement, to installing absorbent backyard rain gardens.
More specifically, Deslatte said, there needs to be an emphasis on “resilient infrastructure,” which “has a greater capacity to bounce back from flooding, extreme heat, and other climate-related shocks.” For example, buildings and transportation systems in regions prone to seismic activity like Japan are built to withstand earthquakes and tremors. If they are damaged, they wouldn’t be as damaged as they typically would be if the buildings were built like they were in, say, Des Moines, Iowa.
But imagine if that same street were made of something more porous like gravel, sand, dirt, or grass. The water wouldn’t flood or pool up as often as it could seep into the ground more easily, and help replenish aquifers. While you can’t replace everything with gravel or grass, there are plenty of green and water friendly building materials out there.
Luckily, there’s already some action being taken. “[Cities] in the U.S. are attempting to determine the vulnerability of their infrastructure to both extreme heat and flooding,” Ralph explained. “But most lack the capacity to do a lot about it without federal aid.
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What Is an Atmospheric River?Greg Uyeno is a science journalist. He has studied cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley and journalism at New York University. He’s always interested in the language of science and the science of language.
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