Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
Nat Commun. 2022 Jul 30;13(1):4421. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32018-4.
Tropical cyclones (TCs) have caused extensive power outages. The impacts of TC-caused blackouts may worsen in the future as TCs and heatwaves intensify. Here we couple TC and heatwave projections and power outage and recovery process analysis to investigate how TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard risk may vary in a changing climate, with Harris County, Texas as an example. We find that, under the high-emissions scenario RCP8.5, long-duration heatwaves following strong TCs may increase sharply. The expected percentage of Harris residents experiencing at least one longer-than-5-day TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard in a 20-year period could increase dramatically by a factor of 23 (from 0.8% to 18.2%) over the 21 century. We also reveal that a moderate enhancement of the power distribution network can significantly mitigate the compound hazard risk. Thus, climate adaptation actions, such as strategically undergrounding distribution network and developing distributed energy sources, are urgently needed to improve coastal power system resilience.
热带气旋（TC）会导致大面积停电。随着 TC 和热浪的加剧，TC 引起的停电的影响可能会在未来恶化。在这里，我们将 TC 和热浪的预测与停电和恢复过程分析相结合，以调查在气候变化下 TC-停电-热浪复合灾害风险可能会如何变化，以德克萨斯州哈里斯县为例。我们发现，在高排放情景 RCP8.5 下，强 TC 之后的长时间热浪可能会急剧增加。在 21 世纪，哈里斯县居民在 20 年内经历至少一次持续时间超过 5 天的 TC-停电-热浪复合灾害的预期百分比可能会急剧增加 23 倍（从 0.8%增加到 18.2%）。我们还揭示，适度增强配电网络可以显著降低复合灾害风险。因此，需要采取气候适应行动，例如战略性地将配电网络地下化和开发分布式能源，以提高沿海电力系统的弹性。
