Research from Purdue University Yields New Data on Climate Change (Hurricane-induced power outage risk under climate change is primarily driven by the uncertainty in projections of future hurricane frequency)

2020 OCT 05 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Climate Change Daily News -- New study results on climate change have been published. According to news reporting from Purdue University by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “Nine in ten major outages in the US have been caused by hurricanes.”

The news reporters obtained a quote from the research from Purdue University: “Long-term outage risk is a function of climate change-triggered shifts in hurricane frequency and intensity; yet projections of both remain highly uncertain. However, outage risk models do not account for the epistemic uncertainties in physics-based hurricane projections under climate change, largely due to the extreme computational complexity. Instead they use simple probabilistic assumptions to model such uncertainties. Here, we propose a transparent and efficient framework to, for the first time, bridge the physics-based hurricane projections and intricate outage risk models. We find that uncertainty in projections of the frequency of weaker storms explains over 95% of the uncertainty in outage projections; thus, reducing this uncertainty will greatly improve outage risk management.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “We also show that the expected annual fraction of affected customers exhibits large variances, warranting the adoption of robust resilience investment strategies and climate-informed regulatory frameworks.”

For more information on this research see: Hurricane-induced power outage risk under climate change is primarily driven by the uncertainty in projections of future hurricane frequency. Scientific Reports, 2020,10(1):1-9. (Scientific Reports - http://www.nature.com/srep/index.html). The publisher for Scientific Reports is Nature Publishing Group.

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-72207-z.

Our news journalists report that more information may be obtained by contacting Negin Alemazkoor, School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University. Additional authors for this research include Benjamin Rachunok, Daniel R Chavas, Andrea Staid, Arghavan Louhghalam, Roshanak Nateghi, Mazdak Tootkaboni.

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