As sea levels rise, coastal communities will experience more frequent and persistent nuisance flooding, and some low‐lying areas may be permanently inundated. Critical components of lifeline infrastructure networks in these areas are also at risk of flooding, which could cause significant service disruptions that extend beyond the flooded zone. Thus, identifying critical infrastructure components that are exposed to sea level rise is an important first step in developing targeted investment in protective actions and enhancing the overall resilience of coastal communities. Wastewater treatment plants are typically located at low elevations near the coastline to minimize the cost of collecting consumed water and discharging treated effluent, which makes them particularly susceptible to coastal flooding. For this analysis, we used geographic information systems to assess the exposure of wastewater infrastructure to various sea level rise projections at the national level. We then estimated the number of people who would lose wastewater services, which could be more than five times as high as previous predictions of the number of people at risk of direct flooding due to sea level rise. We also performed a regional comparison of wastewater exposure to marine and groundwater flooding in the San Francisco Bay Area. Overall, this analysis highlights the widespread exposure of wastewater infrastructure in the United States and demonstrates that local disruptions to infrastructure networks may have far‐ranging impacts on areas that do not experience direct flooding.
Sea level rise increases the risk of storms and other short‐term water‐rise events, because it sets a higher water level such that coastal surges become more likely to overtop protections and cause floods. To protect coastal communities, it is necessary to understand the interaction among multiday and tidal sea level variabilities, coastal infrastructure, and sea level rise. We performed a series of numerical simulations for San Francisco Bay to examine two shoreline scenarios and a series of short‐term and long‐term sea level variations. The two shoreline configurations include the existing topography and a coherent full‐bay containment that follows the existing land boundary with an impermeable wall. The sea level variability consists of a half‐meter perturbation, with duration ranging from 2 days to permanent (i.e., sea level rise). The extent of coastal flooding was found to increase with the duration of the high‐water‐level event. The nonlinear interaction between these intermediate scale events and astronomical tidal forcing only contributes ∼1% of the tidal heights; at the same time, the tides are found to be a dominant factor in establishing the evolution and diffusion of multiday high water events. Establishing containment at existing shorelines can change the tidal height spectrum up to 5%, and the impact of this shoreline structure appears stronger in the low‐frequency range. To interpret the spatial and temporal variability at a wide range of frequencies, Optimal Dynamic Mode Decomposition is introduced to analyze the coastal processes and an inverse method is applied to determine the coefficients of a 1‐D diffusion wave model that quantify the impact of bottom roughness, tidal basin geometry, and shoreline configuration on the high water events.
Sea-level rise (SLR) threatens coastal regions globally, with millions of people at risk of SLR-induced flooding by 2100 (Hauer et al., 2016). As sea levels rise, coastal inundation becomes more frequent and severe, impacting homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure systems located along the shoreline. Coastal communities are wrestling with how to effectively adapt to the threat of future flooding to protect the lives and livelihoods of their residents. Tidal wave propagation in estuaries is influenced by bottom friction, landward convergence (i.e., reduction in cross-sectional area), and partial tidal reflection at the convergent end of the estuary (Van Rijn, 2011). Climate and human drivers of change in these systems, including increases in water depth due to SLR coupled with modified shoreline geometry resulting from adaptation decisions, will affect these processes and alter tidal dynamics and patterns of inundation (Haigh et al., 2020). Numerical studies of estuarine and shelf systems, including the East China Seas (
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