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A Dutch-Texan team found that most Houston-area drowning deaths from Hurricane Harvey occurred outside the zones designated by government as being at higher risk of flooding: the 100- and 500-year floodplains. Harvey, one of the costliest storms in US history, hit southeast Texas on 25 August 2017 causing unprecedented flooding and killing dozens. Researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Rice University in Texas published their results today in the European Geosciences Union journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.

The department of Geoscience & Engineering is part of EPOS-NL, the Dutch contribution to the European infrastructure for geosciences, natural hazards and geo-resources. This project is one of the ten awarded proposals in the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Scientific Infrastructure by NWO.

‘Weather’ is the result of a combination of many diverse factors, such as solar radiation, the concentration of greenhouse gases, air quality and humidity, local building density or vegetation, wind direction and a whole host of underlying physical and chemical processes.

Research by Pieter Smets of TU Delft and the KNMI shows that infrasound can be used for weather and climate forecasts. These inaudible low sound waves can be used to gain a better picture of the stratosphere, which can barely be measured in any other way. On Wednesday 28 March, Smets will be awarded his PhD at TU Delft for his work on this subject.