Impacts of climate change on hurricane flood hazards in Jamaica Bay, New York

Abstract

Sea level rise (SLR) and tropical cyclone (TC) climatology change could impact future flood hazards in Jamaica Bay—an urbanized back-barrier bay in New York—yet their compound impacts are not well understood. This study estimates the compound effects of SLR and TC climatology change on flood hazards in Jamaica Bay from a historical period in the late twentieth century (1980–2000) to future periods in the mid- and late-twenty-first century (2030–2050 and 2080–2100, under RCP8.5 greenhouse gas concentration scenario). Flood return periods are estimated based on probabilistic projections of SLR and peak storm tides simulated by a hydrodynamic model for large numbers of synthetic TCs. We find a substantial increase in the future flood hazards, e.g., the historical 100-year flood level would become a 9- and 1-year flood level in the mid- and late-twenty-first century and the 500-year flood level would become a 143- and 4-year flood level. These increases are mainly induced by SLR. However, TC climatology change would considerably contribute to the future increase in low-probability, high-consequence flood levels (with a return period greater than 100 year), likely due to an increase in the probability of occurrence of slow-moving but intense TCs by the end of twenty-first century. We further conduct high-resolution coastal flood simulations for a series of SLR and TC scenarios. Due to the SLR projected with a 5% exceedance probability, 125- and 1300-year flood events in the late-twentieth century would become 74- and 515-year flood events, respectively, in the late-twenty-first century, and the spatial extent of flooding over coastal floodplains of Jamaica Bay would increase by nearly 10 and 4 times, respectively. In addition, SLR leads to larger surface waves induced by TCs in the bay, suggesting a potential increase in hazards associated with wave runup, erosion, and damage to coastal infrastructure.

Hurricane Flood Hazard Assessment for the Archipelago of San Andres, Providencia and Santa Catalina, Colombia

“…In order to know the Hurricane Iota SS return period at the location of the extreme analysis at Providencia, we extracted the maximum SS of Iota from the computational domain for that point, which is 1.25 m. Thus, looking into the SS return period curve for Providencia, this value has an associate return period of 3,234years (Figure 13B). Given the low probability of the Hurricane Iota SS under present climate, future studies should consider the effect of climate change on tropical cyclones (Lin et al, 2019;Marsooli and Lin, 2020) to know if storm surge values as the one for Hurricane Iota will be more frequent in Providencia and Santa Catalina at the end of the century.…”

“…Tropical Cyclones (TC) present a major hazard for countries in tropical areas (Ortiz-Royero, 2012;Martell-Dubois et al, 2018;Marsooli and Lin, 2020;Mendoza et al, 2020). In 2017, the TC trio of Harvey, Irma, and Maria caused an estimated $215B USD in losses, which were higher than the previous record year of 2005 that included hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma (overall losses $170B USD; insured losses $85B USD) (Faust and Bove, 2017).…”

“…Historically, TC have caused significant loss of life, coastal infrastructure damage, and affectation in the Caribbean economics. Destruction due to such storms comes in the form of heavy high winds, flooding due to storm surge (SS) (Lin et al, 2014;Marsooli and Lin, 2020;Rey et al, 2020) and waves (Chang et al, 2018;Shih et al, 2018;Chen et al, 2019), and heavy rainfall (Sealy and Strobl, 2017). Colombia is one of the countries that are affected by the hurricanes formed in the North-Atlantic basin, particularly the insular part of Colombia, which according to the Colombian Ocean Commission (Comisión Colombiana del Océano) (CCO, 2015) represent 28% of the Colombian territory located in the Caribbean Sea.…”

“…In this study, we followed the method from Ruiz-Salcines et al ( 2021), using synthetic events (Emanuel et al, 2006(Emanuel et al, , 2008 to develop a model-based hurricane SS flood hazard using a hydrodynamic model. As in previous studies (Lin et al, 2010;Meza-Padilla et al, 2015;Appendini et al, 2019;Marsooli and Lin, 2020), this flood hazard assessment methodology does not rely on historical data on TC or surges, but rather generates synthetic storms that are derived based on the physics of TC (Emanuel et al, 2006(Emanuel et al, , 2008, enabling the assessment of SS flood and their return periods in areas with low TC occurrence, as in the archipelago of SPSC. As such, a large number of synthetic TC were generated over the Caribbean Sea, to use those passing 250 km from the middle point between the San Andres and Providencia islands, and used to force a hydrodynamic model to determine hurricane SS and their associated flood in the archipelago.…”

Comprehensive Flood Risk Assessment for Wastewater Treatment Plants under Extreme Storm Events: A Case Study for New York City, United States

“…However, it also places the WWTPs at a lower elevation and increases the risk of the plant being flooded. The sea level on the coast of New York is 9 inches higher than in 1950 [17][18][19]. Forecasts based on the global climate models (GCMs) show that sea levels will rise by 7 to 12 inches by the 2050s and 12 to 23 inches (30.48 to 58.42 cm) by the 2080s [18].…”