Sea-level rise to drive flooding, regardless of changes in hurricane activity

A press release from Virginia Tech: Clamor about whether climate change will cause increasingly destructive tropical storms may be overshadowing a more unrelenting threat to coastal property — sea-level rise — according to a team of researchers writing today in the journal Nature.

After reviewing nearly 100 research studies, the scientists say accelerated sea-level rise certainly will increase the flooding and property damage triggered by tropical cyclones — commonly known as hurricanes in the Atlantic and Northern Pacific — but predicting where, how often, and how powerful these storms will be when they make landfall is full of uncertainty.

“The potential for sea-level rise to dramatically change the landscape is an understudied aspect of coastal flooding,” said Jennifer Irish, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering with the Virginia Tech College of Engineering.  “For example, shoreline erosion, barrier-island degradation, and new tidal inlet formation — these sedimentary changes could lead to catastrophic changes in hurricane flood risk in some areas.”

The research team, led by Jonathan D. Woodruff, an assistant professor of sedimentology and coastal processes at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with Irish and Suzana Camargo, a Lamont research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said regardless of changes in storm activity, rising sea levels will become the dominant driver of flooding and coastal damage.

The scientists cited information from the International Disaster Database of the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters that indicates since 1970, more than 60 percent of all economic losses — about $400 billion — occurred in the North Atlantic, even though it is one of the least active basins for hurricanes....
A clifftop house in 1990 at Cobble Gap in the UK, now washed away. Shot by Gordon Hatton, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license