Media Watch

In a paper published recently in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future, experts in UC Irvine’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering caution that relatively new, nation-scale flood data provides an inadequate representation of local topography and infrastructure, factors known to control the spread of floods in urban areas. “In our analysis of Los Angeles County…we found that estimates of countywide flood exposure from the nationwide data are actually similar to what we find with our more detailed models. However, predictions of which communities and properties are at risk are markedly different,” said lead author Brett Sanders, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of civil and environmental engineering and professor of urban planning and public policy. Read More

“In our analysis of Los Angeles County, which has a population greater than 40 U.S. states and includes over 80 separate municipalities, we found that estimates of countywide flood exposure from the nationwide data are actually similar to what we find with our more detailed models. However, predictions of which communities and properties are at risk are markedly different,” said lead author Brett Sanders, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of civil and environmental engineering and professor of urban planning and public policy. Read More

A group gathered at the UC Irvine one recent day to discuss the “Business of Beaches,” drawing politicians, planners, educators and economic experts to brainstorm ideas to tackle a problem — the shrinking supply of sand that makes up much of the region’s beaches — that could have a domino of disastrous impacts. … While there’s much talk about climate change and the role sea level rise will have in threatening the coastline, the problem is rooted in poor infrastructure design dating back decades — and it can be fixed, according to Brett Sanders, professor of civil and environmental engineering, urban planning and public policy at UC Irvine. Read More

Large-scale turbulence is causing new headaches for anxious aviators in a warming atmosphere, but it’s small-scale turbulence that has always made physicists scratch their heads. The cascading process that transfers energy from the biggest eddies down to the tiniest ones causes a turbulent flow at the small scale to retain no memory of the large-scale flow structure. Because of this memory loss, researchers often assume that small-scale turbulence is isotropic. Subharthi Chowdhuri and Tirtha Banerjee of the University of California, Irvine, now introduce a framework for investigating turbulent flows and show that anisotropy persists even at the small scale. Read More