Abstract
Abstract. Climate change impacts on extreme water levels (WLs) at two United States Pacific Northwest estuaries are investigated using a multicomponent process-based modeling framework. The integrated impact of climate change on estuarine forcing is considered using a series of sub-models that track changes to oceanic, atmospheric, and hydrologic controls on hydrodynamics. This modeling framework is run at decadal scales for historic (1979–1999) and future (2041–2070) periods with changes to extreme WLs quantified across the two study sites. It is found that there is spatial variability in extreme WLs at both study sites with all recurrence interval events increasing with further distance into the estuary. This spatial variability is found to increase for the 100-year event moving into the future. It is found that the full effect of sea level rise is mitigated by a decrease in forcing. Short-recurrence-interval events are less buffered and therefore more impacted by sea level rise than higher-return-interval events. Finally, results show that annual extremes at the study sites are defined by compound events with a variety of forcing contributing to high WLs.
Highlights
Estuaries are important intersections of human and natural systems, serving as some of both the most resource-rich ecosystems on Earth and the most densely populated
While ADCSWAN has the ability to write out numerous variables, the focus of this study is on water levels (WLs) so discussion here will be limited to that variable
In particular this study focused on extremes and changes to recurrence intervals (RIs) events at two Pacific Northwest (PNW) estuaries
Summary
Estuaries are important intersections of human and natural systems, serving as some of both the most resource-rich ecosystems on Earth and the most densely populated. Flooding risk in PNW estuaries is less well understood, primarily due to the greater complexity of the estuarine environment. Estuarine hydrodynamics remain more complicated than open coastlines due to the additional driver of streamflow and a much more complicated topographical context (e.g., embayment and complex bathymetry) (Odigie and Warrick, 2018; Wahl et al, 2015). This makes estuaries difficult to simplify as they exhibit nonlinear water column response (Ding et al, 2013) with forcing contributions being difficult to uncouple (Wolf, 2009)
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