Probabilistic modeling of hurricane surge and rainfall flooding in a changing climate

Water and the Changing Climate
Chair: Jeanne VanBriesen (Carnegie Mellon University)
Global climate change is changing the frequency and magnitude of precipitation events in many regions, and further change is expected. Effects on precipitation-dependent events (drought, flood) as well as on rainfall-dependent systems (water supply, energy systems, agriculture) will challenge our study and management of hydrologic systems. This session will explore methods to study, model, and plan for hydrologic systems under changing climactic conditions.

\"Probabilistic modeling of hurricane surge and rainfall flooding in a changing climate\"
Speaker: Ning Lin (Princeton University)
Co-Authors: Kerry Emanuel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), James Smith (Princeton University), Joannes Westerink
(University of Notre Dame)

Hurricanes, with their strong winds, heavy rainfall, and storm surges, cause much damage and loss of life worldwide. The impacts of these storms may worsen in the coming decades because of rapid coastal development coupled with sea-level rise and possibly increasing hurricane activity due to climate change. Here we present a framework of modeling hurricane hazards in a changing climate. We apply a statistical/deterministic hurricane model driven by global climate models (GCMs) to simulate large numbers of synthetic storms under various projected climate scenarios. We apply the hydrodynamic model ADCIRC to simulate the coastal storm surge induced by the synthetic storms. We apply a physics-based hurricane rainfall model coupled with a distributed hydrologic model to simulate the riverine flooding induced by the synthetic storms. Then we apply statistical analysis to estimate the rainfall and surge flood probabilities under the various climate conditions, based on the simulated synthetic rainfall and storm surge events. We are currently coupling the coastal storm surge and inland rainfall modeling to investigate the compound flooding induced by hurricanes under climate change.