《Weather and the Built Environment》.ppt

This presentation was developed to accompany the Weather and the Built Environment course developed by the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) and the Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education, and Training (COMET). It may be used for community outreach activities, and is customizable to your location. * (You can poll your audience if you like or ask for volunteers to guess.) The answer is four hundred million. *Our population has grown by leaps and bounds over the last century -- from seventy six million in the year nineteen hundred to over two hundred eighty two million in the year two thousand. *In two thousand and six, we passed the three hundred million mark. And we are on our way to four hundred million by two thousand forty. Thats unprecedented growth. *Urban populations, too, are soaring. Currently, eighty three percent of us live in urban or metropolitan setting. Among metro areas of one million plus residents, six grew by more than thirty percent in the nineteen nineties; sixteen grew by more than twenty percent and thirty one grew by more than ten percent. * *About fifty percent of our population lives within fifty miles of a seacoast. Many of these areas are vulnerable to severe weather events like tropical storms and hurricanes. And if climate change produces higher sea levels, the risk to coastal dwellers will only increase. *There are, of course, large inland metropolitan areas as well. Many of these areas are also growing quickly and face their own challenges. Phoenix and Las Vegas, for instance, are two of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. Both are in arid locations where future water supplies are a concern. Scientists studying climate change predict that many regions of the southwest will be subject to more frequent and more intense drought. * *Nationally, were consuming land at twice the rate of population growth. But many places continue to sprawl despite little or no population growth. For instance