A rapid, economical, and accurate method to determining the physical risk of storm marine inundations using sedimentary evidence

Abstract

AbstractThe majority of physical risk assessments from storm surge inundations are derived from synthetic time series generated from short climate records, which can often result in inaccuracies and are time‐consuming and expensive to develop. A new method is presented here for the wet tropics region of northeast Australia. It uses lidar‐generated topographic cross sections of beach ridge plains, which have been demonstrated to be deposited by marine inundations generated by tropical cyclones. Extreme value theory statistics are applied to data derived from the cross sections to generate return period plots for a given location. The results suggest that previous methods to estimate return periods using synthetic data sets have underestimated the magnitude/frequency relationship by at least an order of magnitude. The new method promises to be a more rapid, economical, and accurate assessment of the physical risk of these events.