Climate Change Risk to Coastal Airfield Stormwater Systems

Climate change causes rising sea levels and more intense storm events. Existing stormwater infrastructure, often built with standards from the 20th century, might not have the capacity required to efficiently handle the runoff of these events. Additionally, coastal stormwater infrastructure is especially at risk, as rising sea-levels can accelerate degradation of this infrastructure and threaten to completely submerge discharge points. Combinations of intense storms and sea-level rise could result in system overflow and resultant flooding. The Department of Defense published a report in 2019 reviewing the effects of climate change to operations worldwide. Among these identified challenges, recurrent flooding is noted as a particularly large threat already affects several installations. Furthermore, the Government Accountability Office identified that the Department of Defense has not incorporated climate-change effect-based risk into its infrastructure planning and design. Using a portion of the airfield stormwater system at Tyndall Air Force Base, this research studies the risks of recurrent flooding due to sea-level rise and intensifying storms. SWMM will be used to construct a model of the airfield stormwater system, which will then have design storms applied as capacity is removed due to sea-level rise. The resulting performance of the system under climate change factors can then be used to incorporate risk, in the form of fragility curves, into the planning and management of the stormwater infrastructure.