From The Conversation: What is an atmospheric river? With flooding and mudslides in California, a hydrologist explains the good and bad of these storms and how they’re changing

Article from Scientific American: Visualizing Climate Disasters’ Surprising Cascading Effects[33360]

Many thanks to Chris Jones for the citation.

New Report from the UN: Global Survey Report on Persons with Disabilities and Disasters 2023 ( 43 pp).

Thanks to Jessica Hubbard for providing this citation.

From HSNW: Where Damaging Earthquakes Are Most Likely to Occur in U.S

Scientists recently revealed the latest National Seismic Hazard Model, showing that nearly 75% of the United States could experience a damaging earthquake, emphasizing seismic hazards span a significant part of the country.

https://www.hstoday.us/featured/how-artificial-intelligence-can-reshape-homeland-security-in-2024

An excerpt: “AI is a valuable tool for DHS due to the incredible volume of data and information collected, stored, and shared on a daily basis. DHS can use AI to extract actionable insights from these troves of information. In turn, the DHS workforce is better equipped to make informed decisions quickly, so issues are resolved promptly.”

From HSNW, This report from the National Academy of Sciences: MANAGED RETREAT; Proactively Planning for Community Relocation Before and After Climate Disasters

“Between 1980 and mid-2023, 232 billion-dollar disasters occurred in the U.S. Gulf Coast region, with the number of disasters doubling annually since 2018. As the frequency, intensity, and destructiveness of climate change-driven disasters increase, accompanied by an increase in recovery costs, more experts are calling for a managed retreat of entire communities from disaster-prone areas to safer ground”

From the WashPost: ‘We can do better’: FEMA makes sweeping changes to speed up disaster aid. Hearing frustrations from victims, the federal agency is drastically reforming its individual assistance program for the first time in 20 years. Here’s what that means….

FEMA is hosting a webinar series for the newly released Achieving Equitable Recovery: A Post-Disaster Guide for Local Officials and Leaders (“Equity Guide”).

Webinars will be held:

• Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2 to 3 p.m. Eastern Time
• Wednesday, Jan. 31, 7 to 8 p.m. Eastern Time
• Tuesday, Feb. 13, noon to 1 p.m., Eastern Time

The goal of the Equity Guide is to help local officials and leaders incorporate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (“DEIA”) in their post-disaster recovery management work. Successful disaster recovery requires the whole community to rebuild in a thoughtful, equitable, and resilient manner. This guide supports local officials and leaders in their efforts to build equity into the recovery process by establishing more diverse partnerships, conducting inclusive strategic public engagement, identifying needs of the whole community, leveraging mitigation opportunities, and identifying opportunities to help leverage additional funding opportunities.

The Equity Guide provides actionable steps and includes, checklists, toolkits, case studies, and community examples on how to incorporate equity throughout the recovery management process and how to work toward achieving equitable outcomes.

From HSToday this article re AI and Advanced TechCybersecurity
NIST Identifies Types of Cyberattacks That Manipulate Behavior of AI Systems

Publication lays out “adversarial machine learning” threats, describing mitigation strategies and their limitations.