A walk in the park provided inspiration for a striking photograph that earned national recognition this week for an engineering professor at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Zhao Pan was in a 500-year-old Beijing park in his native China after a sudden rainfall when he noticed huge drops of water hanging from the tips of leaves in cypress trees. “I play with droplets every day, but these were much larger than any I had seen in the lab,” he recalls. “I was amazed by Mother Nature, so I decided to do some research into it.”
First-of-its-kind map outlines Canada's future flood zones
The first flood map of its kind demonstrates how low-lying areas of some of Canada’s major cities could become flooded within the next 80 years. The maps were developed by Slobodan Simonovic, engineering professor emeritus and flood-control expert at Western University. Spanning the entire country, they predict flood activity over the next 80 years based on various climate change scenarios caused by global warming. “[This] was the continuation of our interest in understanding better what are the impacts of climate change on natural disasters in general,” Simonovic told CTV News Channel on Sunday. “My part of the project was to look at how flooding will be affected by climate change.”