Abstract
The western North-Atlantic coast experienced major coastal floods in recent years. Coastal floods are primarily composed of tides and storm surges due to tropical (TCs) and extra-tropical cyclones (ETCs). We present a reanalysis from 1988 to 2015 of extreme sea levels that explicitly include TCs for the western North-Atlantic coastline. Validation shows a good agreement between modeled and observed sea levels and demonstrates that the framework can capture large-scale variability in extreme sea levels. We apply the 28-year reanalysis to analyze spatiotemporal patterns. Along the US Atlantic coasts the contribution of tides can be significant, with the average contribution of tides during the 10 largest events up to 55% in some locations, whereas along the Mexican Southern Gulf coast, the average contribution of tides over the largest 10 events is generally below 25%. At the US Atlantic coast, ETCs are responsible for 8.5 out of the 10 largest extreme events, whereas at the Gulf Coast and Caribbean TCs dominate. During the TC season more TC-driven events exceed a 10-year return period. During winter, there is a peak in ETC-driven events. Future research directions include coupling the framework with synthetic tropical cyclone tracks and extension to the global scale.
Highlights
The western North-Atlantic coasts have experienced major coastal flooding, primarily driven by tropical cyclones (TC)[1]
We develop a complete reanalysis of extreme sea levels along the western North-Atlantic coasts for the period 1988–2015, including tides, and surges from TCs and extra-tropical cyclones (ETCs)
The seasonal patterns become more distinct when analyzing the surge component only (Fig. 7b). It shows that during the Atlantic TC season, which peaks from August to September, there is a larger fraction of TC-driven events with return periods that exceed 10 years
Summary
The western North-Atlantic coasts (including the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico) have experienced major coastal flooding, primarily driven by tropical cyclones (TC)[1]. As climate reanalysis datasets, such as ERA-Interim[30], poorly represent the intensities of TCs31, large scale analyses of extreme sea levels that are based on them tend to poorly represent storm surge from TCs. Zhang and Sheng[32] presented the spatial distribution of return periods of extreme sea levels induced by TCs and ETCs over the eastern continental shelf of North America. In this letter we study the spatiotemporal patterns of sea level extremes along the western North-Atlantic coasts based on a hydrodynamic modeling approach. We develop a complete reanalysis of extreme sea levels along the western North-Atlantic coasts for the period 1988–2015, including tides, and surges from TCs and ETCs. To achieve this, we improved upon the global framework of Muis et al.[25] by explicitly modeling TC surges with high-resolution wind and pressure fields based on a parametric model. Note that the contribution of waves to extreme sea levels is ignored, in some places waves are important drivers of extremes
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