Someone should study the wind effects of variously shaped 178′ hills on the surrounding coastal plain. Wind farm potential? Back at University of Michigan in early 1980s our building development lab used physical water flow models as an analog to air movement at small scales. I wonder if those facilities, if they still exist, could study landforms?

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I’ve been spending some evenings with LIDAR 2′ elevation contours, potential sea level rise and storm surge data. Toxics notwithstanding, it seems that some of the safest places east and south of downtown Houston will eventually be on top of the manmade debris piles. Perhaps we should think about protecting and connecting them.

Blogging about Houston-area sea protection has been proceding apace, but I last read at the coastline. My results so far seem to indicate that under even a best-case sea level rise scenario we may have to abandon quite a bit of the lower land if we want to protect downtown from Cat. 5 storm surge, for instance. NASA’s got to be worried!

I wonder if any place has designed modular, moveable floodgate assemblies on the scale needed at the Houston Ship Channel? And interesting question to calculate how far back to place and when/how often to “move” the earthworks/gates to allow for optimal protection to the greatest amount of population/development over time.

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So much of this depends on temporal estimates of sea level rise, and even expert coastal geologist John B. Anderson gives the impression in his 2007 book that combined thermal seawater expansion and icecap runoff will be limited to a slow rise of one meter by 2100.

I think this is a misreading of the last (2007) ICCP AR4 report, which declined to put a top end figure on the ice melt contribution because its size and timing were too uncertain yet. I thought I read that the one meter was certain based on thermal expansion alone. I’ve got to recheck that.

Latest best case estimates at 2100 that I’ve seen now hover around 5-6 feet of sea level rise in an accelerating pattern. Likely case estimates agree that we are headed at least for the 19′ mark that the world experienced millions of years ago when big parts of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps retreated; again, timing of “un”natural climate change is the unknown variable.

No need to speak of a worst case scenario…so much of Houston is underwater if the rise begins to exceed recent paleo maximum. But Dr. James Hansen has backed off of his warming of an exponential increase ending around 2130, because it seems so improbable to glaciologists based on the inertias involved. But he is standing by an estimate on the order of meters this century as the most unstable icecaps give way. How fast it will proceed from there is anyone’s guess, because no one knows how reliable assumptions based on well-studied historical/slow/natural climate change remain today.