Compound Impact of Storm Surge and Flood Characteristics in Coastal Area Based on Copula

Abstract

In low-lying coastal areas, the interplay of various factors including precipitation, river flow, and storm surge can lead to greater influence on floods when they occur simultaneously. The copula method was used in this study to investigate the bivariate flood risk of compounding storm surge and river discharge events in the Pearl River Delta (PRD). Our results indicate that while the correlation between storm surge and flood peak (S-Q) was weak, there was a strong dependence between the pairs of storm surge–flood volume (S-V) and storm surge–flood duration (S-D). For these three pairs, the Clayton copula was the optimal function for S-Q, while the Frank copula was the optimal function for S-V and S-D, respectively. When the flood volume exceeds 2.0 × 104 m3/s and the flood duration is more than 10 days, the bivariate hydrologic risk for S-V and S-D is observed to decrease rapidly. Furthermore, the failure probability (FP) would be underestimated when the combined impact of river flow and storm surge is ignored in coastal flood risk assessment. Such bivariate hydrologic risk analysis implies that when determining design values in coastal flood risk assessment, the combined impact of river flow and storm surge should be taken into account.