Mapping developed coastal flood zones for climate change adaptation planning: Accounting for tides, waves, sea level rise and flood defense structures
Abstract
The California Coast is subject to flooding from storm events concurrent with tidal extrema or inter-annual phenomena such as El Niño. Current climate change predictions indicate sea levels will rise 1-1.4 meters along the California coast in the next century, which will increase the frequency and magnitude of flooding events in the coming years. Predictive models are needed to map present-day and future flood zones, accounting not only for a changing climate but proposed adaptation measures as well. Considerable scientific and engineering research has focused on integrating and exploiting recently available high resolution topographic data and hydrodynamic models for improved flood zone mapping, particularly in urban areas where traditional models perform poorly. Here, a recently developed hydraulic flood mapping model has been applied at Newport Harbor, an urbanized embayment in southern California, to investigate the role of tides, waves, sea level change and available flood defense data relative to flood map uncertainty. A 2005 flood event provides validation data. The results of this study reveals the efficacy and limitations of available high resolution spatial data, provides insight into water level effects and lastly, highlights the important role of topographic data and data collection efforts in validating and utilizing regional hydrodynamic modeling to guide coastal adaptation.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AGUFMNH21C1412G
- Keywords:
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- 4255 OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL / Numerical modeling;
- 4534 OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL / Hydrodynamic modeling