The impact of climate change on storm surges over Irish waters

Abstract

The Regional Ocean Model System (ROMS) of Rutgers University is used to investigate the influence of anthropogenic climate change on storm surges over Irish waters, particularly on the extreme values. Two experiments were performed to confirm the validity of the approach in the current climate: the first focused on hindcasting the surge generated by a storm in early 2002 while the second provided surge statistics by running the model for the period 1990–2002; in both cases ROMS was driven with ERA-40 forcing fields. The results show that the model is capable of simulating both specific surge events and surge climate statistics with reasonable accuracy (order of 10 cm). Model outputs were also compared spatially against satellite altimetry data, corrected for long wavelength errors, from 1993 to 2001. The ROMS model consistently reproduces the sea level changes in the Irish Sea, and over the waters to the south and west of Ireland. For the investigation of the impact of the climate change on storm surges, the same configuration of ROMS was driven by atmospheric forcing fields downscaled from ECHAM5/OM1 data for the past (1961–1990) and future (2031–2060; SRES A1B greenhouse gas scenario); the downscaled data were produced using the Rossby Centre Regional Atmosphere model (RCA3). The results show an increase in storm surge events around Irish coastal areas in the future projection, except along the south Irish coast; there is also a significant increase in the height of the extreme surges along the west and east coasts, with most of the extreme surges occurring in wintertime.