Tropical cyclone-blackout-heatwave compound hazard resilience in a changing climate

Abstract

Tropical cyclones (TCs) have caused extensive power outages. The impacts of TC-caused blackouts may worsen in the future as TCs and heatwaves intensify. Here we couple TC and heatwave projections and power outage and recovery process analysis to investigate how TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard risk may vary in a changing climate, with Harris County, Texas as an example. We find that, under the high-emissions scenario RCP8.5, long-duration heatwaves following strong TCs may increase sharply. The expected percentage of Harris residents experiencing at least one longer-than-5-day TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard in a 20-year period could increase dramatically by a factor of 23 (from 0.8% to 18.2%) over the 21st century. We also reveal that a moderate enhancement of the power distribution network can significantly mitigate the compound hazard risk. Thus, climate adaptation actions, such as strategically undergrounding distribution network and developing distributed energy sources, are urgently needed to improve coastal power system resilience.

Bayesian updating of solar panel fragility curves and implications of higher panel strength for solar generation resilience

“…When inverters are within buildings, occupants can use their locally generated energy during an outage (Cook et al, 2020). Access to power can be vital for residential buildings, especially if heatwaves following storms increase the demand for cooling (Feng et al, 2021). Access to energy is also pivotal to sustaining emergency response operations for critical infrastructure such as hospitals or fire stations.…”

Increasing risk from landfalling tropical cyclone-heatwave compound events to coastal and inland China

“…But, the projection information on this emerging type of hazards remains too sparse to inform adaptation planning. To our best knowledge, the studies from Matthews et al (2019) and Feng et al (2022) are the only two projecting TC-heatwave compound events. The former one, assuming no change in TCs and independence of two extremes, might underestimate future increases in compound hazards related to TC increases and/or tighter TC-heatwave linkage, and miss those 'blackswan' events occurring at unprecedented magnitudes, time and space.…”

Hurricanes and Anomalous Heat in the Caribbean

“…Moreover, HI values in the Caribbean rarely exceed 35°C and, nonetheless, there is evidence that excess mortality occurs under elevated heat conditions (Méndez‐Lázaro et al., 2021) and that heat is a main public health concern (Méndez‐Lázaro, 2015; Méndez‐Lázaro, Muller‐Karger, et al., 2018; Méndez‐Lázaro, Pérez‐Cardona, et al., 2018; Méndez‐Lázaro et al., 2021). Additionally, tropical cyclones can leave society more vulnerable to heat (Kozlov, 2021; Skarha et al., 2021), a risk that is increased by anthropogenic climate change (Feng et al., 2020; Gasparrini & Leone, 2014; Lin, 2019; Matthews et al., 2019).…”