TY - JOUR
T1 - Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change
AU - Lin, Ning
AU - Emanuel, Kerry
AU - Oppenheimer, Michael
AU - Vanmarcke, Erik
N1 - Funding Information:
N.L. was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, administered by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, and the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy fellowship. We acknowledge the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory computational support. We thank J. Westerink and S. Tanaka of the University of Notre Dame for their support on the ADCIRC implementation. We also thank B. Colle of Stony Brook University for providing us with the high-resolution ADCIRC mesh.
PY - 2012/6
Y1 - 2012/6
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1038/nclimate1389
DO - 10.1038/nclimate1389
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84861155306
SN - 1758-678X
VL - 2
SP - 462
EP - 467
JO - Nature Climate Change
JF - Nature Climate Change
IS - 6
ER -