Abstract
Due to the effects of climate change over the course of the next century, the combination of rising sea levels, severe storms, and coastal change will threaten the sustainability of coastal communities, development, and ecosystems as we know them today. To clearly identify coastal vulnerabilities and develop appropriate adaptation strategies due to projected increased levels of coastal flooding and erosion, coastal managers need local-scale hazards projections using the best available climate and coastal science. In collaboration with leading scientists world-wide, the USGS designed the Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS) to assess the coastal impacts of climate change for the California coast, including the combination of sea-level rise, storms, and coastal change. In this project, we directly address the needs of coastal resource managers in Southern California by integrating a vast range of global climate change projections in a thorough and comprehensive numerical modeling framework. In Part 1 of a two-part submission on CoSMoS, methods and the latest improvements are discussed, and an example of hazard projections is presented.
Highlights
With over 600 million people living in the coastal zone worldwide [1], changes in sea-level and atmospheric conditions, including winds, sea-level pressures (SLPs), and precipitation [2], represent significant potential hazards
We present work showcasing the development of the third generation of Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS) in Southern California
The 500 km stretch of coast is an active, complex tectonic setting along the Pacific and North American plate boundary, resulting in much of the Southern California Bight (SCB) being fronted by a narrow continental shelf, a series of islands, beaches often backed by semi-resistant bedrock sea cliffs, and a highly irregular complex bathymetry that hosts a plethora of submerged seamounts, troughs, J
Summary
With over 600 million people living in the coastal zone worldwide [1], changes in sea-level and atmospheric conditions, including winds, sea-level pressures (SLPs), and precipitation [2], represent significant potential hazards. The coarse resolution and inability of GCMs to represent meso-scale conditions essential for local coastal impact studies [4], make downscaling of GCMs necessary [5] for community-scale coastal hazard identification. Several studies have conducted regional downscaling of GCMs for evaluation of changes in future storm surges and wave conditions of interest to coastal communities [6,7,8,9,10]. Only a few have translated that work to the coastal zone and developed flood hazard maps from the combined impacts of projected sea-level rise (SLR), wave setup and runup, storm surge, and other coastal water level contributors
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