Abstract
We investigate the impact of climate change on the storm surges induced by extratropical cyclones (ETCs) between November and March. We quantify changes to the storm surge between a historical period (1979–2004) and a future period during the mid to late twenty-first century (2054–2079) for a number of major coastal cities in the Northeastern United States. Observed water levels are analyzed to estimate storm surges induced by ETCs during the historical period. A hydrodynamic model is utilized to simulate storm surges induced by ETCs projected for the future climate by seven global climate models. The biases in the hydrodynamic and climate models are calculated and removed from the simulated surge heights. Statistical methods, including the peaks-over-threshold method, are applied to estimate the storm surge return levels. We find that future projections based on most of the climate models indicate relatively small effects of climate change on ETC storm surges. The weighted-average projections over all climate models show a small increase in storm surge return levels (less than 7% increase in 10- and 50-year surge heights). However, uncertainties exist among the climate models and projections from one climate model show a substantial increase in the storm surge return levels (up to 27% and 36% increase in 10- and 50-year surge heights, respectively). These uncertainties, and likely the larger impact of sea level rise, should be accounted for in projecting the risk posted by ETC flooding.
Highlights
Storm surges induced by tropical cyclones (TCs) and extratropical cyclones (ETCs) are often the costliest threat to coastal communities along the northeast coast of the United States
We evaluate the performance of the hydrodynamic modeling based on climate forecast system reanalysis (CFSR) by comparing the modeled and observed storm surge heights generated by historical ETCs between 1979 and 2013
Changes to ETC storm surge levels are projected between the historical period of 1979–2004 and the mid-to-late-twenty-first-century period of 2054–2079 for a number of urban sites in the Northeastern United States, including Boston, New York City, Baltimore, and Washington D.C
Summary
Storm surges induced by tropical cyclones (TCs) and extratropical cyclones (ETCs) are often the costliest threat to coastal communities along the northeast coast of the United States. Michaelis et al (2017) showed that strong ETCs (minimum sea-level pressure perturbation of at least − 51 hPa) within the North Atlantic storm-track region could occur less often under the future climate condition They found a slight increase in maximum and average 10-m wind speeds off the coasts of the Northeastern United States. Roberts et al (2017) used a statistical model to study the impact of simulated twenty-first-century climate changes to ETCs (for the RCP8.5 emission scenario) on coastal flooding at the Battery NY Their multilinear regression model was trained using reanalysis data over 1979–2012 to relate the storm surge height to the surface wind stress and mean sea level pressure.
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