Estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding just tripled. What happened? A calculation error on the part of the satellite technology most commonly relied upon to measure land surface levels. In areas where actual high-quality elevation data are too expensive to obtain or not available, satellites estimate average land elevations by averaging detected land surfaces. However, scientists just discovered that this also has measured and included rooftops in its averages, resulting in overestimation of land elevations.1
The finding begs reflection on our rising dependence on automated technology for safety and risk estimates. Anticipatory planning is difficult when technologies lead us to misrecognize our vulnerabilities. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now being used to correct the errors in land surface estimates. We can hope—but not be overly trusting—that the corrected estimates prove more reliable.
The new finding has implications for energy policies as well: The majority of people living on implicated land are in developing countries across Asia. In Asia, as globally, populations concentrate in coastal areas, and this is therefore also where most nuclear reactors (and toxic waste sites) are located.2 We could be looking at many disasters as water increasingly creeps—and with more frequency and intensity will surge—above its current confines, driven by climate change.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2020.1690379