scholarly journals Supplementary material to "Storm surge and extreme river discharge: a compound event analysis using ensemble impact modelling"

Author(s):  
Sonu Khanal ◽  
Nina Ridder ◽  
Hylke de Vries ◽  
Wilco Terink ◽  
Bart van den Hurk
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonu Khanal ◽  
Nina Ridder ◽  
Hylke de Vries ◽  
Wilco Terink ◽  
Bart van den Hurk

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonu Khanal ◽  
Nina Ridder ◽  
Hylke de Vries ◽  
Wilco Terink ◽  
Bart van den Hurk

Abstract. Many winter deep low-pressure systems passing over Western Europe have the potential to induce significant storm surge levels along the coast of the North Sea. The accompanying frontal systems lead to large rainfall amounts, which can result in river discharges exceeding critical thresholds. The risk of disruptive societal impact increases strongly if river runoff and storm-surge peak occur near-simultaneously. For the Rhine catchment and the Dutch coastal area, existing studies suggest that no such relation is present at time lags shorter than six days. Here we re-investigate the possibility of finding near-simultaneous storm surge and extreme river discharge using an extended data set derived from a storm surge model (WAQUA/DCSMv5) and two hydrological river-discharge models (SPHY and HBV96) forced with conditions from a high-resolution (0.11°/12 km) regional climate model (RACMO2) in ensemble mode (16 × 50 years). We find that the probability for finding a co-occurrence of extreme river discharge at Lobith and storm surge conditions at Hoek van Holland are up to four times higher (than random chance) for a broad range of time lags (−2 to 10 days, depending on exact threshold). This highlights that the hazard of a co-occurrence of high river discharge and coastal water levels cannot be neglected in a robust risk assessment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 489-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anaïs Couasnon ◽  
Dirk Eilander ◽  
Sanne Muis ◽  
Ted I. E. Veldkamp ◽  
Ivan D. Haigh ◽  
...  

Abstract. The interaction between physical drivers from oceanographic, hydrological, and meteorological processes in coastal areas can result in compound flooding. Compound flood events, like Cyclone Idai and Hurricane Harvey, have revealed the devastating consequences of the co-occurrence of coastal and river floods. A number of studies have recently investigated the likelihood of compound flooding at the continental scale based on simulated variables of flood drivers, such as storm surge, precipitation, and river discharges. At the global scale, this has only been performed based on observations, thereby excluding a large extent of the global coastline. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap and identify regions with a high compound flooding potential from river discharge and storm surge extremes in river mouths globally. To do so, we use daily time series of river discharge and storm surge from state-of-the-art global models driven with consistent meteorological forcing from reanalysis datasets. We measure the compound flood potential by analysing both variables with respect to their timing, joint statistical dependence, and joint return period. Our analysis indicates many regions that deviate from statistical independence and could not be identified in previous global studies based on observations alone, such as Madagascar, northern Morocco, Vietnam, and Taiwan. We report possible causal mechanisms for the observed spatial patterns based on existing literature. Finally, we provide preliminary insights on the implications of the bivariate dependence behaviour on the flood hazard characterisation using Madagascar as a case study. Our global and local analyses show that the dependence structure between flood drivers can be complex and can significantly impact the joint probability of discharge and storm surge extremes. These emphasise the need to refine global flood risk assessments and emergency planning to account for these potential interactions.


Author(s):  
Anaïs Couasnon ◽  
Dirk Eilander ◽  
Sanne Muis ◽  
Ted I. E. Veldkamp ◽  
Ivan D. Haigh ◽  
...  

Abstract. The interaction between physical drivers from oceanographic, hydrological, and meteorological processes in coastal areas can result in compound flooding. Compound flood events, like Cyclone Idai and Hurricane Harvey, have revealed the devastating consequences of the co-occurrence of coastal and river floods. A number of studies have recently investigated the likelihood of compound flooding at the continental scale based on simulated variables of flood drivers such as storm surge, precipitation, and river discharges. At the global scale, this has only been performed based on observations, thereby excluding a large extent of the global coastline. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap and identify potential hotspots of compound flooding from river discharge and storm surge extremes in river mouths globally. To do so, we use daily time-series of river discharge and storm surge from state-of-the-art global models driven with consistent meteorological forcing from reanalysis datasets. We measure the compound flood potential by analysing both variables with respect to their timing, joint statistical dependence, and joint return period. We find many hotspot regions of compound flooding that could not be identified in previous global studies based on observations alone, such as: Madagascar, Northern Morocco, Vietnam, and Taiwan. We report possible causal mechanisms for the observed spatial patterns based on existing literature. Finally, we provide preliminary insights on the implications of the bivariate dependence behaviour on the flood hazard characterisation using Madagascar as a case study. Our global and local analyses show that the dependence structure between flood drivers can be complex and can significantly impact the joint probability of discharge and storm surge extremes. These emphasise the need to refine global flood risk assessments and emergency planning to account for these potential interactions.


Author(s):  
Jakob Zscheischler ◽  
Olivia Martius ◽  
Seth Westra ◽  
Emanuele Bevacqua ◽  
Colin Raymond ◽  
...  

<p>Weather- and climate-related extreme events such as droughts, heatwaves and storms arise from interactions between complex sets of physical processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales, often overwhelming the capacity of natural and/or human systems to cope. In many cases, the greatest impacts arise through the ‘compounding’ effect of weather and climate-related drivers and/or hazards, where the scale of the impacts can be much greater than if any of the drivers or hazards occur in isolation; for instance, when a heavy precipitation falls on an already saturated soil causing a devastating flood. Compounding in this context refers to the amplification of an impact due to the occurrence of multiple drivers and/or hazards either because multiple hazards occur at the same time, previous climate conditions or weather events have increased a system’s vulnerability to a successive event, or spatially concurrent hazards lead to a regionally or globally integrated impact. More generally, compound weather and climate events refer to a combination of multiple climate drivers and/or hazards that contributes to societal or environmental risk.</p><p>Although many climate-related disasters are caused by compound events, our ability to understand, analyse and project these events and interactions between their drivers is still in its infancy. Here we review the current state of knowledge on compound events and propose a typology to synthesize the available literature and guide future research. We organize the highly diverse event types broadly along four main themes, namely preconditioned, multivariate, temporally compounding, and spatially compounding events. We highlight promising analytical approaches tailored to the different event types, which will aid future research and pave the way to a coherent framework for compound event analysis. We further illustrate how human-induced climate change affects different aspects of compound events, such as their frequency and intensity through variations in the mean, variability, and the dependence between their climatic drivers. Finally, we discuss the emergence of new types of events that may become highly relevant in a warmer climate.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Loveland ◽  
Amin Kiaghadi ◽  
Clint N. Dawson ◽  
Hanadi S. Rifai ◽  
Shubhra Misra ◽  
...  

Compound flooding is a physical phenomenon that has become more destructive in recent years. Moreover, compound flooding is a broad term that envelops many different physical processes that can range from preconditioned, to multivariate, to temporally compounding, or spatially compounding. This research aims to analyze a specific case of compound flooding related to tropical cyclones where the compounding effect is on coastal flooding due to a combination of storm surge and river discharge. In recent years, such compound flood events have increased in frequency and magnitude, due to a number of factors such as sea-level rise from warming oceans. Therefore, the ability to model such events is of increasing urgency. At present, there is no holistic, integrated modeling system capable of simulating or forecasting compound flooding on a large regional or global scale, leading to the need to couple various existing models. More specifically, two more challenges in such a modeling effort are determining the primary model and accounting for the effect of adjacent watersheds that discharge to the same receiving water body in amplifying the impact of compound flooding from riverine discharge with storm surge when the scale of the model includes an entire coastal line. In this study, we investigated the possibility of using the Advanced Circulation (ADCIRC) model as the primary model to simulate the compounding effects of fluvial flooding and storm surge via loose one-way coupling with gage data through internal time-dependent flux boundary conditions. The performance of the ADCIRC model was compared with the Hydrologic Engineering Center- River Analysis System (HEC-RAS) model both at the watershed and global scales. Furthermore, the importance of including riverine discharges and the interactions among adjacent watersheds were quantified. Results showed that the ADCIRC model could reliably be used to model compound flooding on both a watershed scale and a regional scale. Moreover, accounting for the interaction of river discharge from multiple watersheds is critical in accurately predicting flood patterns when high amounts of riverine flow occur in conjunction with storm surge. Particularly, with storms such as Hurricane Harvey (2017), where river flows were near record levels, inundation patterns and water surface elevations were highly dependent on the incorporation of the discharge input from multiple watersheds. Such an effect caused extra and longer inundations in some areas during Hurricane Harvey. Comparisons with real gauge data show that adding internal flow boundary conditions into ADCIRC to account for river discharge from multiple watersheds significantly improves accuracy in predictions of water surface elevations during coastal flooding events.


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