The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 6 (of six, for now)
Part Six – The Light at the End of the Tunnel is a Thunderstorm Decisions need to be made. A building must be declared inside, or outside, of a flood…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 5
Part Five – Back to Where It All Started Some weeks ago, this author began looking into how weather history relates to “100-year flood” numbers that are used in many…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 4
Part Four – Pretending to Be Super Smart Probability theory is full of theorems that work “for very large n”, the number of samples in a sequence. Taken to the…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 3
Part Three – An Enormous Data Set (and small bites of it) We’ve come to the question of how well or badly we can make estimations of future severe weather…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 2
Part Two – Sampling the Longest Available Data Set Looking for information about rare events, we naturally gravitate toward records with a long history. In this section we try to…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 1
Part One – Are the 100-Year Flood Maps We Use Any Good? Anyone who has tried to buy a house has probably seen a form somewhere in the closing packet…