Reconstructing patterns of coastal risk in space and time along the US Atlantic Coast, 1970-2016

Abstract

Abstract. Despite interventions intended to reduce impacts of coastal hazards, the risk of damage along the US Atlantic Coast continues to rise. This reflects a long-standing paradox in disaster science: even as physical and social insights into disaster events improve, the economic costs of disasters keep growing. Risk can be expressed as a function of three components: hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Risk may be driven up by coastal hazards intensifying with climate change, or by increased exposure of people and infrastructure in hazard zones. But risk may also increase because of interactions, or feedbacks, between hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Here, we present a data-driven model that describes trajectories of risk at the county scale along the US Atlantic Coast over the past five decades. We also investigate indications of feedbacks between risk components that help explain these trajectories. Our findings suggest that spatially explicit modelling efforts to predict future coastal risk need to address feedbacks between hazard, exposure, and vulnerability to capture emergent patterns of risk in space and time.

Relative contributions of water level components to extreme water levels along the United States Southeast Atlantic Coast from a regional-scale water level hindcast

“…The coastal zone in the southern portion of this region (Florida) is highly developed whereas the north section represents a more mixed land usage (Titus et al, 2009). Low lying vulnerable infrastructure is ubiquitous along the coast (e.g., Armstrong and Lazarus, 2019;Bin et al, 2011;Wdowinski et al, 2018;Ezer and Atkinson, 2014), and approximately 14 million residents live in the coastal counties spanning the study region (US Census, 2021).…”