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 21^st century. We also reveal that a moderate enhancement of the powe

SUBMITTER: Feng K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9338923 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature