Climate determinism! Of cholera outbreaks.

The UK Met Office is involved in some very interesting things. I was not aware of this, but read about it just this morning on BBC News Online.

The basic idea is simple: predict precipitation fields (not trivial in itself) and determine where there is likely to be increased local flood risk. I don’t know exactly how they did it. But the Met Office does interesting things with resampling of historical data. If historic information was good enough for sufficiently many areas, one way to do this would be to train a maximum entropy (maxent) model on the data with a given set of variables, then run it with the climate model-derived variables for a larger area. This is common in the mapping of species ranges. It’s excellent when just this sort of science is put to work for aid and development work.

Image source: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/embed/p06jc8wm/45259922