Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change

Ning Lin, Kerry Emanuel, Michael Oppenheimer, Erik Vanmarcke

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

443 Scopus citations

Abstract

Storm surges are responsible for much of the damage and loss of life associated with landfalling hurricanes. Understanding how global warming will affect hurricane surges thus holds great interest. As general circulation models (GCMs) cannot simulate hurricane surges directly, we couple a GCM-driven hurricane model with hydrodynamic models to simulate large numbers of synthetic surge events under projected climates and assess surge threat, as an example, for New York City (NYC). Struck by many intense hurricanes in recorded history and prehistory, NYC is highly vulnerable to storm surges. We show that the change of storm climatology will probably increase the surge risk for NYC; results based on two GCMs show the distribution of surge levels shifting to higher values by a magnitude comparable to the projected sea-level rise (SLR). The combined effects of storm climatology change and a 1m SLR may cause the present NYC 100-yr surge flooding to occur every 3-20yr and the present 500-yr flooding to occur every 25-240yr by the end of the century.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)462-467
Number of pages6
JournalNature Climate Change
Volume2
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2012

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Environmental Science (miscellaneous)
  • Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

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