A global reanalysis of storm surges and extreme sea levels

By S. Muis, Martin Verlaan, Hessel Winsemius, Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts, Philip J. Ward. Nature Communications, 2016

638 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extreme sea levels, caused by storm surges and high tides, can have devastating societal impacts. To effectively protect our coasts, global information on coastal flooding is needed. Here we present the first global reanalysis of storm surges and extreme sea levels (GTSR data set) based on hydrodynamic modelling. GTSR covers the entire world's coastline and consists of time series of tides and surges, and estimates of extreme sea levels. Validation shows that there is good agreement between modelled and observed sea levels, and that the performance of GTSR is similar to that of many regional hydrodynamic models. Due to the limited resolution of the meteorological forcing, extremes are slightly underestimated. This particularly affects tropical cyclones, which requires further research. We foresee applications in assessing flood risk and impacts of climate change. As a first application of GTSR, we estimate that 1.3% of the global population is exposed to a 1 in 100-year flood. Protection of coastlines from devastating flooding associated with sea-level extremes is impeded by a lack of continuous records. Here, the authors apply a hydrodynamic modelling approach and present the first reanalysis of tides, surges and extreme sea levels for the entire world's coastline.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Earth-Surface Processes, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/425b5fb3e86b78086e8c80af3d35954369c3414f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

1. Martin Verlaan
2. Luc Feyen
3. Lorenzo Mentaschi
4. Svetlana Jevrejeva

In Oceanography

1. Martin Verlaan
2. Hessel Winsemius
3. Svetlana Jevrejeva

Citations in the corpus

• Dependence between high sea-level and high river discharge increases flood hazard in global deltas and estuaries (2018, background): “Recent advances in large-scale flood modelling enable the simulation of continuous time-series at daily to sub-daily time scales (e.g. Ward et al 2013, 2017, Muis et al 2016, Yamazaki et al 2011, Vousdoukas et al 2016, Veldkamp et al 2018).”
• Global probabilistic projections of extreme sea levels show intensification of coastal flood hazard (2018, background): “(3) are the impact of self-attraction and loading (SAL) of the ocean upon itself due to the long term alteration of ocean density changes, globally averaged steric sea-level change (STR), dynamic sea-level change (DSL), surface mass balance of ice from glaciers and ice-caps (GLA), surface mass balan”