Advith's Calendar

Anthony Corrales:

When the Grid Goes Down, Neighbors Show Up: Understanding Social Capital in Western North Carolina during Hurricane Helene 

The 2024 Hurricane Season saw the devastation of many communities in Western North Carolina from Hurricane Helene, partially attributed to the impact of a predecessor rain event (PRE) in the days leading to the storm. With 252 fatalities and widespread infrastructure failure, formal emergency systems struggled to reach many residents. How, then, did communities remain resilient? Drawing on 20 interviews with English- and Spanish-speaking residents, community leaders, and science communicators in Buncombe and Henderson Counties, this study examines how bonding, bridging, and linking forms of social capital shaped preparedness, response, and recovery. Using a phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis, we identify how different forms of social capital operated across phases of the disaster, often functioning as informal infrastructure when formal systems failed. These findings suggest that disaster resilience during cascading system failures depends not only on forecast accuracy and warning dissemination, but on pre-existing social networks that shape trust, information flow, and protective decision-making. We conclude with recommendations for risk communicators seeking to strengthen community-level resilience ahead of future tropical cyclones and PRE-related impacts.

Megha Rao: 

Atmospheric Circulation Constraints on Future Changes in Tropical Cyclone Activity

Projecting potential changes in future tropical cyclone (TC) activity remains challenging due to biases and uncertainties in climate model simulations. While model projections are typically interpreted with observation-based empirical relationships, these relationships are often qualitative or yield conflicting results. In this study, we leverage observable trends in climate features to assess which model projections are most plausible. Applying the emergent constraints (EC) framework to a suite of high-resolution climate models (HighResMIP), we identify robust, physically-intuitive relationships between key features of large-scale circulation in the historical period (1981-2010) and projected changes in TC activity by mid-century (2021-2050). Our analysis of Northern Hemisphere TCs reveals statistically significant relationships between lifetime maximum intensity latitude and the northern Hadley cell edge, ITCZ latitude, and zonal-mean total shear. Zonal-mean total shear is also significantly correlated with TC annual frequency. By anchoring these relationships in observational data, this approach provides a powerful tool for reducing uncertainty in future TC projections and improving our understanding of evolving global storm risk.