Assessing the Rapid Growth of Expected Coastal Flood Exposure Due to Sea Level Rise
Abstract
The impacts of rising sea levels can already be felt today, as storm tides reach extreme heights more frequently, thereby increasing the expected annual exposure (EAE) to coastal flooding experienced by many municipalities. While a number of earlier studies estimate the magnitude of flood exposure by certain dates, the rate at which exposure changes, which receives much less attention, is another critical factor in determining the costs and abilities of communities to adapt. Rates of escalating EAE do not correlate well with rates of SLR, and can change significantly over short amounts of time and distance, due to local patterns of topography and development. We present a method to assess these rates and the evolution of EAE this century for individual municipalities, by integrating exposure computed at various water heights using lidar and census data with distributions of extreme storm events and sea level rise. We apply these techniques to a number of coastal U.S. municipalities, and depending on the carbon emissions choices society makes in the coming decades, high exposure growth rates that are exceptionally rare today (such as in Atlantic City) could become much more commonplace by the end of this century, potentially experienced by major cities such as Boston, Miami, and Hoboken.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMNH31A1902K
- Keywords:
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- 1641 Sea level change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 4313 Extreme events;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4328 Risk;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4546 Nearshore processes;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL