by Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee
Background
Sidd said: “frightening article by Jeff Masters. We saw some of this coming, the flood risk aint just
along the coast, it extends 100 miles inland…
the water cant get out …”
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/08/the-floods-of-the-future-wont-come-one-at-a-time/
In the 1990s, Sidd and I began developing real-estate-based climate risk models. From the beginning, one of the underlying high-risk factors was flooding—and, closely linked to it, the availability and affordability of flood insurance. In the early 2000s, we met with FEMA, Fannie Mae (FNMA), and Freddie Mac (FHLMC) to better understand their flood-risk modeling and emerging plans for managed retreat.
In October 2023, Sidd observed: “Now I am thinking the violent rain will be a bigger problem before we die.”
That concern has become increasingly relevant. As the Earth warms, warmer air can physically hold more water vapor than cooler air. For every 1°C (1.8°F) increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold approximately 7% more moisture, increasing the potential for extreme precipitation. Over a 10°C increase, atmospheric moisture-holding capacity would nearly double, creating the potential for substantially more intense rainfall.
The problem, however, is not simply the amount of water falling from the sky. It is also what happens when that water moves across the landscape—and whether infrastructure and government response systems are capable of managing, containing, and recovering from the resulting flows.
Flow forces scale with the square of velocity (v²). As flow speeds increase—whether from heavier rainfall, steeper runoff, or more intense hydrological events—the destructive force of moving water rises rapidly. Density further magnifies this effect. Water is roughly 800 times denser than air, meaning that a comparable flow velocity can produce dramatically greater force.
Together, we developed a series of models incorporating the Clausius–Clapeyron relationship, the extreme energy transfer within the water cycle through latent heat, and fluid-flow dynamics. These models increasingly pointed toward a risk structure in which flooding could no longer be treated as an isolated coastal problem. Instead, precipitation intensity, runoff, topography, infrastructure vulnerability, insurance stress, and limited recovery capacity can interact and compound one another across much larger regions.
By 2026, the framework had evolved from a theoretical real-estate climate-risk model into a broader multiplicative risk framework that could be evaluated against observed real-world conditions.
The latest evolution of this work is presented in the following three papers:
- Coupled Climate Feedbacks and Cascading Real Estate Risk
— Mukherjee and Brouse (August 2026)- High-Risk U.S. Real Estate Regions Under the Multiplicative Climate Risk Framework
— Mukherjee and Brouse (August 2026) - Global Real Estate Climate Risk: A Multiplicative Vulnerability Ranking
— Mukherjee and Brouse (August 2026)
- High-Risk U.S. Real Estate Regions Under the Multiplicative Climate Risk Framework