Global probabilistic projections of extreme sea levels show intensification of coastal flood hazard

By Michalis I. Vousdoukas, Lorenzo Mentaschi, E. Voukouvalas, Martin Verlaan, Svetlana Jevrejeva, L. Jackson, Luc Feyen. Nature Communications, 2018

659 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Global warming is expected to drive increasing extreme sea levels (ESLs) and flood risk along the world’s coastlines. In this work we present probabilistic projections of ESLs for the present century taking into consideration changes in mean sea level, tides, wind-waves, and storm surges. Between the year 2000 and 2100 we project a very likely increase of the global average 100-year ESL of 34–76 cm under a moderate-emission-mitigation-policy scenario and of 58–172 cm under a business as usual scenario. Rising ESLs are mostly driven by thermal expansion, followed by contributions from ice mass-loss from glaciers, and ice-sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Under these scenarios ESL rise would render a large part of the tropics exposed annually to the present-day 100-year event from 2050. By the end of this century this applies to most coastlines around the world, implying unprecedented flood risk levels unless timely adaptation measures are taken. Extreme sea levels are a flood risk along the world’s coastlines. Here the authors carry out probabilistic projections of extreme sea levels and show that for the present century coastal flood hazards will increase significantly along most of the global coastlines.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Earth-Surface Processes, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/931fe4ca64376aab4fb7f7376b3bb55f897db695

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In Atmospheric Science

1. Antony J. Payne
2. Sonia I. Seneviratne
3. Joel Guiot
4. Christian Schoof

In Oceanography

1. O. Hoegh‐Guldberg
2. Chris Hope
3. Ross Jones
4. Michael Lesser
5. A. Baker
6. Todd C. LaJeunesse

Citations in the corpus

• The human imperative of stabilizing global climate change at 1.5°C (2019, background): “1 m of sea level rise, for example, will expose an additional 10 million people to flooding by 2100 (5), particularly those living in low-lying deltas and small islands (5, 51).”
• Visualizing the Consequences of Climate Change Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (2019, methodology): “Secondly, probabilistic projection data of Extreme Sea Levels until the end of the 21st century along the global coastline was extracted (for the 50th quantile) from Vousdoukas et al. (2018) in year 2050 to create a second binary map.”