Dealing with hurricane surge flooding in a changing environment: part I. Risk assessment considering storm climatology change, sea level rise, and coastal development

Coastal flood risk will likely increase in the future due to urban development, sea-level rise, and potential change of storm surge climatology, but the latter has seldom been considered in flood risk analysis. We propose an integrated dynamic risk analysis for flooding task (iDraft) framework to assess coastal flood risk at regional scales, considering integrated dynamic effects of storm climatology change, sea-level rise, and coastal development. The framework is composed of two components: a modeling scheme to collect and combine necessary physical information and a formal, Poisson-based theoretical scheme to derive various risk measures of interest. Time-varying risk metrics such as the return period of various damage levels and the mean and variance of annual damage are derived analytically. The mean of the present value of future losses (PVL) is also obtained analytically in three ways. Monte Carlo (MC) methods are then developed to estimate these risk metrics and also the probability distribution of PVL. The analytical and MC methods are theoretically and numerically consistent. A case study is performed for New York City (NYC). It is found that the impact of population growth and coastal development on future flood risk is relatively small for NYC, sea-level rise will significantly increase the damage risk, and storm climatology change can also increase the risk and uncertainty. The joint effect of all three dynamic factors is possibly a dramatic increase of the risk over the twenty-first century and a significant shift of the probability distribution of the PVL towards high values. In a companion paper (Part II), we extend the iDraft to perform probabilistic benefit-cost analysis for various flood mitigation strategies proposed for NYC to avert the potential impact of climate change.