Modelling sea level rise impacts on storm surges along US coasts

By C. Tebaldi, B. Strauss, C. Zervas. 2012

468 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sound policies for protecting coastal communities and assets require good information about vulnerability to flooding. Here, we investigate the influence of sea level rise on expected storm surge-driven water levels and their frequencies along the contiguous United States. We use model output for global temperature changes, a semi-empirical model of global sea level rise, and long-term records from 55 nationally distributed tidal gauges to develop sea level rise projections at each gauge location. We employ more detailed records over the period 1979–2008 from the same gauges to elicit historic patterns of extreme high water events, and combine these statistics with anticipated relative sea level rise to project changing local extremes through 2050. We find that substantial changes in the frequency of what are now considered extreme water levels may occur even at locations with relatively slow local sea level rise, when the difference in height between presently common and rare water levels is small. We estimate that, by mid-century, some locations may experience high water levels annually that would qualify today as ‘century’ (i.e., having a chance of occurrence of 1% annually) extremes. Today’s century levels become ‘decade’ (having a chance of 10% annually) or more frequent events at about a third of the study gauges, and the majority of locations see substantially higher frequency of previously rare storm-driven water heights in the future. These results add support to the need for policy approaches that consider the non-stationarity of extreme events when evaluating risks of adverse climate impacts.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d3891cb14136388a080d265eac2f1246ea984c5

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Citations in the corpus

Tidally adjusted estimates of topographic vulnerability to sea level rise and flooding for the contiguous United States (2012, background): “This last center of concern merits special note because recent research suggests that coastal floods may reach locally rare heights more swiftly in southern California than almost any other CONUS area, when considering effects of sea level rise integrated with storm surge patterns [6].”
Estimating global damages from sea level rise with the Coastal Impact and Adaptation Model (CIAM) (2015, background): “…heights, shifting the probability distribution by the amount of rise, which will shorten return periods and expand current floodplain boundaries (Tebaldi et al, 2012).3 Finally, relative SLR includes local change in the sea surface height relative to the land, due to factors such as daily…”
Joint effects of storm surge and sea-level rise on US Coasts: new economic estimates of impacts, adaptation, and benefits of mitigation policy (2014, methodology): “For the West Coast sites, therefore, we relied on an analysis of historic tide gauge water levels following Tebaldi, Strauss, and Zervas (2012).”
Informing Climate Adaptation: A Review of the Economic Costs of Natural Disasters, Their Determinants, and Risk Reduction Options (2012, unknown): “Tebaldi et al. (2012) estimate the return periods associated with extreme storm surges influenced by SLR along the U.S. coast and compare those with baseline estimates of no SLR (assuming no change in the nature of extreme events).”