Extreme Weather in Brazil

Brazil


 Today we are changing paths a bit and talking about Brazil!

Brazil is the largest country in South America, with a population of about 216 million people. According to news source Brazilian Report, Brazil is "the lightning capitol of the world". There is an average of 77.8 million lightning strikes in Brazil per year. 

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

NASA's Earth Observatory describes the reason why so many thunderstorms occur in Brazil. The excessive warm temperatures and moist air lower in the atmosphere energize the storm as the warm air rises. We discussed in this weeks chapter that more severe thunderstorms occur when there is a high amount of water vapor and updraft of air. This is a normal phenomenon in Brazil.




The image above comes from PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America). It represents a spacial distribution of annual water vapor flows in mm/yr due to vegetation before human impacts. We can see that a majority of Brazil accounts for a significant amount of the higher levels of water vapor. 






On March 28th of this year, New York Times article "One of the Luckiest Lighting Strikes Ever Recorded" was published and talks about extremely rare footage of the use of lightning rods on buildings. Lightning rods, typically made of copper or aluminum are set on top of buildings and will send a positive discharge that will connect to the negative discharge that comes from the lightning. The lighting will travel through the rod and safely into the ground via wires. This reduces the threat of high voltages and currents in buildings. 

Severe thunderstorms, like the ones in Brazil, can have serious damaging effects. Some other hazards that  occur due to thunderstorms are flash flooding, landslides, strong winds, hail, etc. leading to property damage and even death. There is significant research that suggests that severe storms will only grow worse in time if we do not take action soon.















Sources:
https://brazilian.report/environment/2020/01/27/brazil-lightning-capital-world/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/science/lightning-rod-video.html
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/2443/thunderstorms-over-brazil

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 8 Mass Wasting Hazards

Image
Mass Wasting in the Dominican Republic  Hazard Level: HIGH Mass wasting as defined in Natural Hazards "refers to a rapid downslope movement of rock or soil as a more or less coherent mass." We commonly hear terms like "landslides" and "rockslides" which are referring to mass wasting.  There are various types of landslides such as; falling, sliding, slumping, or creep. These various types of landslides are defined by the movement of the slope and can be a combination of those types.  Landslides, as well as rockslides do not require a trigger to occur. Gravity plays a major role in landslides, in addition to the slope and topography, climate, vegetation, water and time.  Landslides are considered to be a high hazard level in the Dominican Republic. According to Think Hazard by the GFDRR, some major factors that lead to this high hazard in the Dominican Republic are the rainfall patterns, terrain slope, geology, land cover and earthquakes. All of this being
Read more

Coastal Erosion in the DR

Image
 Coastal Erosion in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic  Much of the Dominican Republic's coastline is in danger of erosion due to minimally regulated, tourism driven hotel development and the severe impacts of climate change such as sea level rise. While a major percentage of the countries GDP comes from tourism, an approximately $7 billion industry, by not preserving the iconic coastlines, there might not be much left for tourists to see or walk on decades from now.  The invasiveness of the hotels built so close to the coastline threatens coastal ecosystems that are crucial to minimizing erosion, such as mangrove swamps that act as a natural barrier from winds and storm surges. There was also extensive loss of coastland due to category 4 hurricane Irma and category 3 hurricane Maria in 2017. Researchers estimated that about 208 meters of beach were lost after the hurricanes.  The image above is of a Punta Cana business owner, Julio Rodriguez, in standing beside the market he used to r
Read more