The administration of US President Barack Obama plans to provide private companies and local governments better access to climate data to help the public understand the risks they face.
The White House on Wednesday announced the initiative, which the government hopes will help people understand flooding risks in coastal areas, the Associated Press reports.
The Obama administration is working with Google, Microsoft, and Intel to come up with tools to make communities more resilient in dealing with weather extremes, such as flooding, heat waves and drought, the report says.
The high-tech companies are expected to prepare computer simulations for Americans to use and see what would happen with rising seas and other warming scenarios. They will also create new apps on disaster risk.
The idea is to create easy-to-use tools for the average person to prepare people to be more resilient to the harms of climate change, said White House advisers John Podesta and John Holdren in a blog.
Climate scientist Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science said, “It is especially important for people, communities and firms to understand the features of their environment and their operations that create climate risk.”
Field will soon be the chief author of a massive United Nations affiliated report on the impacts of global warming. He said in an email to the AP, “We need a serious, sustained conversation about climate change and dealing with it in a responsible manner.”
Late in February, a winter storm brought heavy rains to the drought-hit state of California, creating flooding in some areas across the state.
The federal government plans a website for climate data at http://climate.data.gov.
ARA/ARA
No comments:
Post a Comment