Stochastic simulation of storm surge extremes along the contiguous United States coastlines using the max-stable process

Abstract

Extreme sea levels impact coastal society, property, and the environment. Various mitigation measures are engineered to reduce these impacts, which require extreme event probabilities typically estimated site-by-site. The site-by-site estimates usually have high uncertainty, are conditionally independent, and do not provide estimates for ungauged locations. In contrast, the max-stable process explicitly incorporates the spatial dependence structure and produces more realistic event probabilities and spatial surfaces. We leverage the max-stable process to compute extreme event probabilities at gridded locations (gauged and ungauged) and derive their spatial surfaces along the contiguous United States coastlines by pooling annual maximum (AM) surges from selected long-record tide gauges. We also generate synthetic AM surges at the grid locations using the predicted distribution parameters and reordering them in the rank space to integrate the spatiotemporal variability. The results will support coastal planners, engineers, and stakeholders to make the most precise and confident decisions for coastal flood risk reduction.