Climate change exacerbates hurricane flood hazards along US Atlantic and Gulf Coasts in spatially varying patterns

Reza Marsooli,Kerry Emanuel,Kairui Feng,Ning Lin

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-11755-z

Reza Marsooli, Kerry Emanuel + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11755-z

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Abstract

One of the most destructive natural hazards, tropical cyclone (TC)–induced coastal flooding, will worsen under climate change. Here we conduct climatology–hydrodynamic modeling to quantify the effects of sea level rise (SLR) and TC climatology change (under RCP 8.5) on late 21st century flood hazards at the county level along the US Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. We find that, under the compound effects of SLR and TC climatology change, the historical 100-year flood level would occur annually in New England and mid-Atlantic regions and every 1–30 years in southeast Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico regions in the late 21st century. The relative effect of TC climatology change increases continuously from New England, mid-Atlantic, southeast Atlantic, to the Gulf of Mexico, and the effect of TC climatology change is likely to be larger than the effect of SLR for over 40% of coastal counties in the Gulf of Mexico.

Highlights

One of the most destructive natural hazards, tropical cyclone (TC)–induced coastal flooding, will worsen under climate change
Recent research has shown that the spatial variability in sea level rise (SLR) and extratropical cyclone (ETC) climatology change results in flood hazards that vary across the basin and global scales[11,12,13,14]
The relative effect of TC climatology change increases continuously from New England, mid-Atlantic, southeast Atlantic, to the Gulf of Mexico, and the effect of TC climatology change is likely to be larger than the effect of SLR for over 40% of coastal counties in the Gulf of Mexico

Summary

Introduction

One of the most destructive natural hazards, tropical cyclone (TC)–induced coastal flooding, will worsen under climate change. An effective approach is to statistically generate large samples of synthetic TCs for reanalysis or GCM-projected climate conditions[19,20] to drive hydrodynamic modeling and assess flood hazards. This climatological–hydrodynamic approach[21], induces the second challenge: balancing accuracy and efficiency in hydrodynamic modeling. We apply a widely used hydrodynamic model[23,24] with a recently developed basin scale computational mesh[25] to simulate the storm tides (the combination of storm surge and astronomical tide) induced by these synthetic TCs for the US Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. The relative effect of TC climatology change increases continuously from New England, mid-Atlantic, southeast Atlantic, to the Gulf of Mexico, and the effect of TC climatology change is likely to be larger than the effect of SLR for over 40% of coastal counties in the Gulf of Mexico

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