News Updates

A large eddy of warm water swirling in the Gulf of Mexico may transform storms this summer into powerful hurricanes, an NPR station in South Florida reports. The eddy spun off the Loop Current that continually circulates in the Gulf. In Issues, Virginia Gewin details how a group of international researchers have been working since 2018 to improve predictions of the current’s behavior. “Timely predictions,” she writes, “could boost safety for oil and gas work, marine traffic, and search and rescue operations in the Gulf, while also improving forecasts of hurricanes, fisheries productivity, climate change-induced coastal flooding, and sea level rise.”

Miami is seeing record heat, which the National Weather Service says has become “standard of late.” Helping the city and surrounding Dade County cope is Jane Gilbert’s job as chief heat officer. As Gilbert describes on an Issues podcast, she and her team use a mix of technical, environmental, and social tools to find “win-win” solutions for residents and the community. Three main goals guide efforts, she says: informing and preparing residents and workers; cooling homes and shelters, especially in low-income settings; and cooling neighborhoods through such things as tree planting and improving energy efficiency.

To counter the intermittent nature of solar and wind energy, utilities in California and elsewhere are building more and bigger batteries to store electricity for later use, the New York Times reports. In Issues, Sarah Kurtz and four other researchers look broadly at the potential of energy storage. Batteries hold promise, the authors write. But rather than locking on one technology geared to power producers, policymakers and researchers should focus on “pushing the frontiers of knowledge by developing inter-sectoral models and scenarios to better understand and quantify potential benefits of synergies among different ways of storing energy across the economy.”

Chinese automakers are building “a new generation of bigger, more technologically advanced and competitive electric cars” aimed at expanding their sales worldwide, the New York Times reports. The plans only heighten the timeliness of recommendations that John D. Graham, Keith B. Belton, and Suri Xia offer in Issues for how US electric car makers, with help from the federal government and states, can compete. The steps won’t be easy. But given China’s penchant for “anticompetitive behavior,” the authors note, there is “no choice but to pursue industrial policies that are not typical of a country that cherishes free-market capitalism.”