Sponsor
Work by P.O., A.B., N.G., and S.V. was funded by the NASA Centers call for support of the National Climate Assessment (Hall, PI; agreements NNX12AI28G and NNX15AD61G), NASA’s Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science ROSES-2012 (grant NNX14AD48G), and NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program (award NA10OAR4310212). Work by T.H. was also funded by the NASA projects listed above. Work by S.T. was funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (award W1927N-14-2-0015). Supercomputer resources were utilized under a grant of computer time from the City University of New York High Performance Computing Center under NSF grants CNS-0855217, CNS- 0958379, and ACI-1126113.
Published In
Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-31-2016
Subjects
Storm surges, Tides, North Atlantic oscillation -- Environmental aspects, North Atlantic Ocean -- Climate
Abstract
Recent studies of flood risk at New York Harbor (NYH) have shown disparate results for the 100 year storm tide, providing an uncertain foundation for the flood mitigation response after Hurricane Sandy. Here we present a flood hazard assessment that improves confidence in our understanding of the region's present-day potential for flooding, by separately including the contribution of tropical cyclones (TCs) and extratropical cyclones (ETCs), and validating our modeling study at multiple stages against historical observations. The TC assessment is based on a climatology of 606 synthetic storms developed from a statistical-stochastic model of North Atlantic TCs. The ETC assessment is based on simulations of historical storms with many random tide scenarios. Synthetic TC landfall rates and the final TC and ETC flood exceedance curves are all shown to be consistent with curves computed using historical data, within 95% confidence ranges. Combining the ETC and TC results together, the 100 year return period storm tide at NYH is 2.70 m (2.51–2.92 at 95% confidence), and Hurricane Sandy's storm tide of 3.38 m was a 260 year (170–420) storm tide. Deeper analyses of historical flood reports from estimated Category-3 hurricanes in 1788 and 1821 lead to new estimates and reduced uncertainties for their floods and show that Sandy's storm tide was the largest at NYH back to at least 1700. The flood exceedance curves for ETCs and TCs have sharply different slopes due to their differing meteorology and frequency, warranting separate treatment in hazard assessments.
DOI
10.1002/2016JC011679
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/21210
Citation Details
Orton, P. M., T. M. Hall, S. A. Talke, A. F. Blumberg, N. Georgas, and S. Vinogradov (2016), A validated tropical-extratropical flood hazard assessment for New York Harbor, J. Geophys. Res. Oceans, 121, 8904–8929.
Included in
Civil Engineering Commons, Environmental Engineering Commons, Hydraulic Engineering Commons
Description
© 2016. American Geophysical Union. This is the publisher's final PDF version. The article was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 121 and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2016JC011679