Abstract
Coastal planners and decision makers design risk management strategies based on hazard projections. However, projections can differ drastically. What causes this divergence and which projection(s) should a decision maker adopt to create plans and adaptation efforts for improving coastal resiliency? Using Norfolk, Virginia, as a case study, we start to address these questions by characterizing and quantifying the drivers of differences between published sea-level rise and storm surge projections, and how these differences can impact efforts to improve coastal resilience. We find that assumptions about the complex behavior of ice sheets are the primary drivers of flood hazard diversity. Adopting a single hazard projection neglects key uncertainties and can lead to overconfident projections and downwards biased hazard estimates. These results highlight key avenues to improve the usefulness of hazard projections to inform decision-making such as (i) representing complex ice sheet behavior, (ii) covering decision-relevant timescales beyond this century, (iii) resolving storm surges with a low chance of occurring (e.g., a 0.2% chance per year), (iv) considering that storm surge projections may deviate from the historical record, and (v) communicating the considerable deep uncertainty.
Highlights
Coastal flood hazards are increasing in many regions around the world[1,2]
We choose to compare these studies for three reasons: 1) they depict knowledge gained over a decade of research, 2) they integrate global sea-level rise (SLR) scenarios with regional factors, and 3) the values intend to support stakeholder groups and communities in regard to coastal preparedness planning and risk management
The first method provides probabilistic projections of individual components of SLR for representative concentration pathways (RCP)[21] or target temperature stabilization scenarios, which are downscaled to the local level[1,15,16,17]
Summary
Coastal flood hazards are increasing in many regions around the world[1,2]. Decision makers are designing strategies to manage the resulting risks[3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Relevant examples include the U.S Army Corps of Engineers[4,5,6], Tebaldi et al.[19], Parris et al.[13], Zervas[20], Kopp et al.[1], Hall et al.[8], Kopp et al.[15], Sweet et al.[14], Wong and Keller[16], Rasmussen et al.[17], and Wong[18] These studies have broken important new ground, but they are hard to compare due to differences in underlying assumptions and projection structure. Decision makers assess community vulnerability, and design and implement flood risk management strategies on a local to regional scale. The overall goal of this work is to evaluate the current scientific knowledge to identify and highlight current limitations and community needs that can support real coastal preparedness planning and risk management processes
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