Wednesday forecast for Austin: Mostly sunny skies with a high near 100 degrees. The National Weather Service says it could feel even warmer as the heat index value reaches 104. The low tonight will be around 76 with southeast winds of 5 to 10 mph.
The Texas coast: Going, going…
At this time of year, everybody’s up for a trip to the coast, and cities along the water in Texas are adapting to a changing and often mercurial climate.
Regardless of the cause of climate change – not going there, thanks – this is good and it isn’t really anything new. The Galveston seawall was built after the 1900 hurricane – the deadliest in American history, killing 5,000 people. These days, with Texas as a whole in a warming pattern since the 1960s, rains tend to be less frequent but more intense when they occur. San Antonio flooded two years ago after it got as much as 15 inches of rain over nine hours, and let’s not forget the Austin area’s own Memorial Day weekend floods. Meanwhile, cities on the coast are changing their building codes as sea levels rise and are expected to keep doing so.
Here’s a link to some sobering research done by the University of Arizona at Tucson. If they’re right and waters rise one meter or more, some of your favorite coastal places, including Galveston, Port Arthur and Corpus Christi, could one day be partially submerged.
It’s not just the Union of Really Worried Scientists tracking these developments. The Texas General Land Office is tracking erosion along the 367 miles of the state’s coastline. It says the average rate of erosion for the entire length of the coast is 2.3 percent per year. But 64 percent of the coast is eroding at 6 feet per year or higher. Some spots are losing 30 feet every year. More on that is here.
Erosion control isn’t sexy but not doing anything hurts property values, harms the tourist economy and makes damage from big storms like Hurricane Ike worse. Not depressed yet? Take a look at this.
So enjoy your beach house while you can.
