It's often difficult to predict whether your home will experience flooding because governments have not done a good job publicizing information about flood risks, says Brett Sanders, professor of civil and environmental engineering, urban planning, and public policy at the University of California, Irvine.
Amir AghaKouchak, UCI civil & engineering professor writes, “We believe that understanding drought as a multi-dimensional, multi-scale phenomenon characterized by compounding processes that involves feedbacks between hu
One factor behind Beijing’s recent vulnerability to floods is its rapid development, says Shao Sun, [engineering visiting associate researcher], a climatologist at the University of California, Irvine. … “China’s rapid urbanization has led to a proliferation of impermeable surfaces,” he says. “Green spaces such as parks and gardens play a vital role in water retention.
As the coronavirus outbreak spread into the United States, Dr. Brian Wong, a plastic surgeon at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center, wanted to know what doctors on the front lines could do if they ran out of ventilators. In March, Wong organized daily conference calls on Zoom to brainstorm ideas with a couple of his colleagues, and they adopted the name Bridge Ventilator Consortium. Soon, medical professionals from all over the country began dialing in. … "I was amazed." Dr. Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist at UCI, said.
UC Irvine researchers created a free smartphone app, dubbed TrackCOVID, which develops an anonymous graph of interactions by pooling user data every time an individual gathers with others or goes to a public place. App users can log their interactions and "checkpoints", or places visited, and the app anonymously links users' interactions as they congregate in the same places over time.
UC Irvine Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Brett Sanders said coastal communities are thinking more about new ways to keep sand on the beaches, an important buffer between waves and infrastructure. … As a region, we’ve prioritized development over shoreline protection. One of the consequences of how we’ve developed land and drainage systems, we no longer transport sand to the coast the way it once was.” Coastal towns should also be working together to find solutions, Sanders said. [Subscription required, campus-wide access provided by UCI Libraries.
“Always when there is a hurricane, you have compounding effects of ocean flooding — surge — and terrestrial flooding,” said Amir AghaKouchak, an associate professor of hydrology and remote sensing at the University of California at Irvine.
“The flood zone was something that was known, what I think no one expected was the possibility of mud coming down and maybe clogging up some of the designated flow paths, causing them to back up and flow into this neighborhood,” said Brett Sanders, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine. Sanders says the mud could have resulted from the intensity of the rainfall, which can mobilize more sands and turn into a mudflow.
Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist at UC Irvine’s medical school and a contributor to the Bridge Ventilator Consortium ventilator project, described the use-case for that project as “only in situations where you don't have any ventilators available and the patient needs a ventilator.” In collaboration with the consortium, Virgin Orbit has designed a ventilator of the “automating-a-manual-resuscitator” variety. It’s nowhere near as complex as a critical care ventilator.
That kind of contamination would make contact with the water dangerous, said Sunny Jiang, professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
Amir AghaKouchak, UCI professor of civil & environmental engineering and Earth system science writes, “I study cascading hazards like this, in which consecutive events lead to human disasters. Studies show climate change is raising the risk of multiple compound disasters, and it’s clear that communities and government agencies aren’t prepared.
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FEMA manages nearly all flood policies in the U.S., requiring them in neig
Johns Hopkins University microbiologist Jocelyne DiRuggiero wanted to find out how it’s possible for a microbe to carry out photosynthesis in an environment where there is essentially no water available. So she collaborated with University of California, Irvine, materials scientist David Kisailus, who probed the biogeochemical relationship between microbe and rock using a battery of analytical tools usually reserved for studying nonliving materials.
The Hazel Crow Opportunity Fund supports expenses for WICS members to participate in conferences that focus on computer sciences, such as the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Nationwide, women earned only 18 percent of the bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science in 2010, according to the National Science Foundation. That's less than half the proportion in 1985, when 37 percent of those degrees went to women.
