Download Duka_Castillo_The effects of climate change on New York City

The effects of climate change on New York City
given extreme weather patterns
Pricila Castillo and Almira Duka
Introduction
As the effects of global warming
are slowly but surely affecting every
country on the Earth, some of these
effects have a high risk factor of causing
complete destruction to the landmasses
where dense populations are found
including New York City. The concept of
global warming, although debatable of
what it actually is, is evident enough not
to be ignored. Global occurrences such
as the acceleration of the melting of the
ice caps, the transgression and regression
of the sea level and temperature increase
are constantly being argued if whether or
not humans are truly at fault for this
climate change. Compared to past
records, these statistics are not
corresponding to what the planet has
adapted to as “normal.” Some make the
valid interpretation that in the Earth’s
history, there have been times where
Earth wasn’t homogeneous. With time
and adaption, the Earth began to change
and balanced its gas levels to a normal
rate. This raises the question: Is the
Earth going through another one of it’s
phases or are we doing this to ourselves?
Conclusions
Methods
As our project stemmed from research being
conducted by Professor Alan Benimoff, we
formulated our topic to focus specifically on the
impression that is made by the effects of climate
change and all of its factors, on the increased
frequency of extreme weather. Although we
wanted data to be as accurate and conceivable as
possible, we studied data sets within the past five
years: specifically the year 2008 until 2012.
Through our first stages of research we found that
large cities account for roughly half of the world’s
CO2 emissions, meanwhile their locations often
make them susceptible to becoming impacted by
sea level rise. Due to this, we gathered data sets on
daily New York City gas emissions, sea level
variances, as well as daily temperature reports.
Using the National Climatic Data Center of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
we received over 5,000 data points that we then
entered into excel to be compared to each other.
When examined against each other, each factor
showed an overall correlation. When we placed the
same data into MatLab and ran a Wilcoxon RankSum test, however, we established that our found
correlations were not due to chance.
Satellite image of Superstorm Sandy
Results
Abstract
Within the past few years, New York
City has experienced bizarre incidents of
extreme weather. The argument remains,
however, whether these extremes are
directly related to climate change or
simply isolated incidents. To come closer
to understanding, use of the Wilcoxon
Rank-sum test will distinguish statistical
correlations
between
previous
temperature, sea level, and carbon level
data, which will then be compared to an
increased frequency of extreme weather
patterns.
References
Gornits, V., Couch, S., & Hartig, E. K. (2002). Impacts of
sea level rise in the new york city metropolitan area.
Global and Planetary Changes, 32, 61-88.
Kamal-Chaoui, Lamia and Alexis Robert (eds.) (2009),
“Competitive Cities and
Climate Change”, OECD
Regional Development Working Papers N° 2, 2009,
OECD publishing, © OECD.
Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. (n.d.). National climatic data center
Acknowledgements:
Professor Alan Benimoff, Austin Krauza