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Storm surges are the most important driver of flooding in many coastal areas. Understanding the spatial extent of storm surge events has important financial and practical implications for flood risk management, reinsurance, infrastructure reliability and emergency response. In this paper, we apply a new tracking algorithm to a high-resolution surge hindcast (CODEC, 1980–2017) to characterize the spatial dependence and temporal evolution of extreme surge events along the coastline of the UK and Ireland. We quantify the severity of each spatial event based on its footprint extremity to select and rank the collection of events. Several surge footprint types are obtained based on the most impacted coastal stretch from each particular event, and these are linked to the driving storm tracks. Using the collection of the extreme surge events, we assess the spatial distribution and interannual variability of the duration, size, severity, and type. We find that the northeast coastline is most impacted by the longest and largest storm surge events, while the English Channel experiences the shortest and smallest storm surge events. The interannual variability indicates that the winter seasons of 1989-90 and 2013–14 were the most serious in terms of the number of events and their severity, based on the return period along the affected coastlines. The most extreme surge event and the highest number of events occurred in the winter season 1989–90, while the proportion of events with larger severities was higher during the winter season 2013–14. This new spatial analysis approach of surge extremes allows us to distinguish several categories of spatial footprints of events around the UK/Ireland coast and link these to distinct storm tracks. The spatial dependence structures detected can improve multivariate statistical methods which are crucial inputs to coastal flooding assessments.
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Spatial Footprints of Storm Surges Along the Global Coastlines
Abstract We perform the first global analysis of the spatial footprints of storm surges, using observed and simulated storm surge data. Three different techniques are applied to quantify the spatial footprints: clustering analysis, percentage of co‐occurrence, and joint probability analysis. The capability of the simulated data to represent the observed storm surge footprints is demonstrated. Results lead to the identification of coastline stretches prone to be impacted simultaneously by the same storm surge events. The spatial footprint sizes differ around the globe, partially conditioned by the geography of the coastline, that is, more irregular coastlines consist of a larger number of different storm surge clusters with varying footprint sizes. For the northwestern Atlantic, spatial footprints of storm surges vary when specifically accounting for tropical cyclones, using storm track information in the storm surge simulations. Our results provide important new insights into the spatial footprints of storm surges at the global scale and will help to facilitate improvements in how coastal flood risk is identified, assessed, and managed, by taking these spatial features into account.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1854896
- PAR ID:
- 10445090
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1029
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans
- Volume:
- 125
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2169-9275
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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