“If you’re a regional flood manager and you’re thinking about what the highest priority project [is], the shifts in the data product could shift where the budget goes,” said Brett Sanders, an author of the paper and a Chancellor’s Professor of civil and environmental engineering, urban planning and public policy at UC Irvine. Sanders and his team reached their conclusion by comparing two flood-risk models for Los Angeles County … Read More

The amount of rainfall in Iran's main river basins between September 2020 and July 2021 was, in most places, substantially lower compared to the same period last year …. Researchers in the United States have gathered data using satellite imagery. This data compares rainfall up to March of this year against the 40-year average. The first three months of 2021 were all well below that average, according to the Center for Hydrometeorology at the University of California Irvine. Read More

Amir AghaKouchak, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth system sciences at the University of California, Irvine, told me in an interview that because land subsidence occurs in increments, the crisis is usually overlooked. “It lacks the dramatic visibility of acute disasters like earthquakes and floods, allowing authorities to underplay its risks,” says AghaKouchak. In Iran, “this invisibility is a key reason land subsidence remains on the sidelines in national disaster planning, despite its profound long-term consequences,” he adds.

The trick, said A. Lee Swindlehurst, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Irvine, is “to find a sweet spot where only the driver’s device is jammed,” regardless of where he or she holds their phone. This is technically feasible, he said, “but it would be a challenging design.” [Subscription required, you can request an electronic copy of the article by sending an email to communications@uci.edu.]