The Environmental Journal of Southern Appalachia

Displaying items by tag: helene

ForWarn Helene 2 Screenshot 2024 10 30 120938The ForWarn vegetation tracking tool shows areas of red where extreme disturbance to the forest canopy occurred in Western North Carolina, East Tennessee and southern Virginia as a result of Hurricane Helene in late September 2024.  Jitendra Kumar/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Information will help timber gleaning, fire-hazard mitigation

Stephanie Seay is a senior science writer and communications specialist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

OAK RIDGE — A visualization tool that tracks changes to the nation’s forests in near-real time is helping resource managers pinpoint areas with the most damage from Hurricane Helene in the Southeast.

The ForWarn visualization tool was co-developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory with the U.S. Forest Service. The tool captures and analyzes satellite imagery to track impacts such as storms, wildfire and pests on forests across the nation. 

When staff with the Forest Service’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center in Asheville, North Carolina, were unable to work in the immediate aftermath of Helene due to utility outages, the ORNL-hosted ForWarn system continued monitoring the storm’s impact and providing reports. ForWarn indicated areas of severe disturbance to the forest canopy that were later confirmed by aerial photography. 

“ForWarn helps quickly identify areas that may need remediation such as timber harvesting or prescribed burns as piles of felled trees dry out and potentially pose wildfire hazards,” said ORNL’s Jitendra Kumar.

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IMG 0759 2048x1365In East Tennessee on Tuesday, Gov. Bill Lee viewed a buckled road damaged by the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.  Brandon Hull/Office of the Governor via Tennessee Lookout

National health care groups warned in 2022 that the unusual Tenncare fund now being used for disaster relief would redirect dollars away from low-income enrollees

Anita Wadhwani is a senior reporter for Tennessee Lookout.

NASHVILLE ­ In the days after Hurricane Helene unleashed catastrophic floods across parts of East Tennessee — killing 17 and inflicting hundreds of millions of dollars in damage — Gov. Bill Lee convened a series of conference calls with his cabinet members to urge his team to “think outside the box” in how to get desperately needed capital to hard-hit rural counties.

TennCare Director Stephen Smith offered up a novel idea: tap into a special savings pool within Tennessee’s Medicaid program, which draws on a combination of state and federal funds to pay the health care bills for 1.5 million Tennesseans living in or near poverty — among them pregnant women, children, seniors and those with disabilities.

Lee, who later recounted the conversation at a news conference, went with it.

The Helene Emergency Assistance Loans (HEAL) program will direct $100 million in no-interest loans from TennCare to 13 disaster-struck Tennessee counties, tapping so-called “shared savings” funds that are unique to the state’s Medicaid program.

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Wednesday, 23 October 2024 14:01

Helene: Climate change fed the monster

image000001The CSX rail line through the Nolichucky River Gorge near Erwin, Tennessee was one of many transportation and vital commerce links destroyed by epic river flooding spawned by Tropical Storm Helene Sept. 26-27, 2024.  Jonathan Mitchell for Hellbender Press

ORNL Climate Change Institute: Weirdly warm water that spawned and fed Hurricane Helene was 500 times more likely due to climate change

OAK RIDGE — Hellbender Press spoke with Oak Ridge National Laboratory Climate Change Science Institute Director Peter Thornton about whether Hurricane Helene and its subsequent and disastrous impact on the Southern Appalachians was made worse by climate change. Citing an increasing scientific ability to link climate change to specific weather events, he said in a very matter-of-fact manner that yes, Helene was fueled by the symptoms and consequences of global warming caused by human emissions of carbon and other pollutants.

Thornton cited a World Weather Attribution report as a main source for his data and commentary, and summarized its research on Helene for Hellbender Press. Here is the interview, edited for clarity and brevity:

Hellbender Press: Can you please state your credentials?
 

“I am the director of the Climate Change ScienceInstitute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I am a corporate fellow researchstaff at the laboratory in the area of earth system modeling and coupled carbon-cycle climatefeedbacks at the global scale all the way down to local scales.” 

HP: The effects of Hurricane Helene were worsened by preceding rain events, correct?

“The event as it played out along the sort of the eastern flankof the Southern Appalachians was influenced strongly by precipitation that came beforethe storm even made landfall. There was what’s referred to as a stalled cold front, which was sitting over that SouthernAppalachian region and the front, kind of a linear element, stretched from Atlanta up along the flankof the Southern Appalachians.

“There were river stages that were already approaching record levels in some areasof that region before the storm arrived. There was probably moisture being pulled in from theouter bands of the storm into that stalled cold front, which was making that precipitation eventslightly bigger than it would have been otherwise. But it was an independentsynoptic-scale meteorological event.

(That could be linked to increased moisture, a hallmark of climate change, on the fringes of the tropical system, but there’s no data on that yet).

ThorntonNGEE 2Peter Thornton, director of the Climate Change Science Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is shown here doing climate-research field work in 2015. ORNL

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