Impacts of changing Arctic hydrodynamics and wave conditions on maritime transportation

Climate change is reducing sea ice coverage and extending open water periods in the Arctic, opening new opportunities for global maritime transportation through the region. However, it is also causing stronger and more frequent summer and fall storms, resulting in storm surges and flooding that can dramatically impact coastal communities and infrastructure. Moreover, changing environmental conditions are also expected to increase permafrost thawing, resulting in even larger coastal susceptibility to erosion. In anticipation of expanded maritime routes and supporting infrastructure in the region, this study is investigating the impacts of the Arctic fast-changing hydrodynamic and waves conditions on navigation, port infrastructure, and coastal communities. The study is based on a multi-model framework integrating Global Climate Models (GCM), regional hydrodynamic and phase-averaged wave energy models, high-resolution sea-ice and concentration forecasts, high-resolution coastal erosion models, and vessel-icing models. This presentation will focus on the assessment of the aforementioned regional hydrodynamic and wave modeling components by implementing the ADCIRC+SWAN coupled models to simulate coastal hydrodynamics and wave energy in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas. Complementarily, it is also being investigated the: i) tradeoffs between computational time and prediction accuracy from different numerical mesh resolutions at local and regional scales of interest to navigation assets; ii) sensitivity of different formulations representing the impact of ice cover and concentration on storm surge and wave generation based on several historical storms; iii) the impacts of a range of climate change scenarios, by means of different GCM predictions of sea-ice concentration and extent, wind and pressure fields, on storm surge and waves. We expect that this future predictions will support maritime navigation transportation models and vessel-icing models, as well as the serve as boundary conditions to a local, process-based, coastal geomorphic change modeling framework (i.e. Arctic XBeach), which accounts for thermal and mechanical process at a higher resolution to support Arctic ports planning and expansion.