Cabot office weekly roundup

Cabot office weekly roundup – 29 June 2012

Wow! What weather we have been having! Incredibly hot, sticky and humid down south in Bristol – I’ve been feeling like I’m in an urban rainforest - and freaky hail, lightning and rainfall up north, causing landslides, flooding and serious damage. Are these signs of environmental change and is it a warning of risks that will be commonplace in the UK in the future? A very Cabot-y question! Check out the news coverage.

This week I have been updating the Cabot website and have uploaded a video from the AXA Research Day and all the presentations from theday. The content highlights the success of the Cabot Institute in bringing together people who work in different disciplines but cover the same ground, in this case volcanoes. There is still more video content to come including coverage of the whole days presentations and conversation.

We have been struck by the hideousness of the #sciencegirlthing issue bouncing around Twitter last week. For those who haven’t seen it, here’s the video which created a huge negative international response from male and female scientists alike. We are proud to say that our very own climate modeller Tamsin Edwards will be turning into a real model along with Cabot engineer Ellie Cosgrave who are organising a real female scientist calendar in backlash to the video. Stay tuned to the blog to find out who else is going to be in it...

And finally, Cabot Institute Artist in Residence, Neville Gabie has launched his very own blog to track the items and stories acquired for his new project – Common Room. Neville is attempting to collect an item from every Cabot community member and display it in a public archive. Each item will have a story attached to explain how the item is the gravitational centre of why we research what we research here at Cabot. It’s going to be an absolutely fascinating project and we expect big things from Neville, so keep checking back on his blog and if you want to learn more or have something you want to share, do get in touch with Neville. Read more here.

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment. If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For example

1-in-200 year events

You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve

Coconuts and climate change

Before pursuing an MSc in Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of Bristol, I completed my undergraduate studies in Environmental Science at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. During my final year I carried out a research project that explored the impact of extreme weather events on coconut productivity across the three climatic zones of Sri Lanka. A few months ago, I managed to get a paper published and I thought it would be a good idea to share my findings on this platform. Climate change and crop productivity There has been a growing concern about the impact of extreme weather events on crop production across the globe, Sri Lanka being no exception. Coconut is becoming a rare commodity in the country, due to several reasons including the changing climate. The price hike in coconuts over the last few years is a good indication of how climate change is affecting coconut productivity across the country. Most coconut trees are no longer bearing fruits and thos

Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

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