“Many Florida homes can withstand category 5 hurricane winds, but not flooding. Babcock Ranch, a town near Fort Myers and Cape Coral, has stayed mostly unscathed during major storms like Hurricane Irma, Ian, Milton and Helene. 

WSJ spoke with the town’s engineer to uncover the hurricane-proofing designs that help protect it.”

From Wall Street Journal.

“Technology giant Google harnessed motion sensors on more than two billion mobile phones between 2021 and 2024 to detect earthquakes, and then sent automated warnings to millions of people in 98 countries. In an analysis of the data, released in Science today, Google’s scientists say that the technology captured more than 11,000 quakes and performed on a par with standard seismometers.”

From Nature.

“If the ocean floor had a nervous system, it might look something like this: thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables connected to sensors set atop the fault lines where Japan’s earthquakes begin. Completed in June, this system aims to stave off devastation like that of 2011—when a relentless six-minute-long temblor was followed by a 130-foot tsunami that reached speeds of 435 miles per hour and pounded cities into rubble. Delayed alerts gave some communities less than 10 minutes to evacuate and only warned of much smaller waves, based on inaccurate earthquake readings. Nearly 20,000 people died, with thousands more injured or missing…

With the final N-net link set up this June, the complete system increases warning times by 20 seconds for earthquakes and a full 20 minutes for tsunamis—enough time to divert incoming flights and close sea gates in busy ports.”

From Scientific American.

“In February, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) — a world leader in forecasting global weather conditions up to a few weeks out — quietly went live with the planet’s first fully operational weather forecast system powered by artificial intelligence. 

The new A.I. forecasts are, by leaps and bounds, easier, faster, and cheaper to produce than the non-A.I. variety, using 1,000 times less computational energy. And, in most cases, these A.I. forecasts, powered by machine learning, are more accurate, too. ‘Right now the machine learning model is producing better scores,’ says Peter Dueben, a model developer at ECMWF in Bonn, who helped to develop the center’s Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS). The improvement is hard to quantify, but the ECMWF says that for some weather phenomena, the AIFS is 20 percent better than its state-of-the-art physics-based models.

Andrew Charlton-Perez, a meteorologist at the University of Reading who also heads up that institution’s school of computational sciences, expects plenty more operational A.I. forecasts to follow — from both national weather agencies and companies like Google.”

From Yale Environment 360.