As instrumental records often cover only short time periods, historical information is the main source of data in order to extend natural disaster catalogs. This study aims to show the feasibility of quantifying extreme sea levels and skew surges during storm events by using historic documentary data. The documentary data related to the extreme events are often not freestanding enough to directly extract water levels and subsequently skew surge levels, and hence auxiliary information such as dike sketches was used to interpret the collected data. First a strategy for the reconstruction of historic levels is presented which implies an analysis on three different scales: (1) the data scale, (2) the quantification scale, and (3) the event scale. Strong hypotheses were made during the quantification processes of the historic water levels and skew surges. Therefore, the methodology also aims to trace the hypotheses taken for the surges reconstruction, to inform potential users about the different degrees of reliability of estimated values. Secondly, this strategy is applied on an existing database of storms and storm surges that occurred in Dunkirk in the north of France, which contains 75 events. Within this database the focus was set on surge events that hit Dunkirk between 1778 and 1846 and seven new skew surges were estimated for that period.
Au cours de la dernière décennie, la tempête Xynthia et d'autres ont marqué l'actualité de par leur intensité et les dégâts causés lors de leur passage sur le territoire français. Ces événements peuvent donner l'impression qu'ils n'ont été "jamais vu par le passé", mais le recensement des tempêtes plus anciennes (1953, 1987, 1999…) montre que de tels phénomènes surviennent en fait régulièrement sur le littoral métropolitain. Dès lors, la collecte et l'analyse d'informations historiques apparaissent incontournables pour améliorer la prévention des risques littoraux, en particulier liée à la submersion marine. Afin de mutualiser les informations disponibles en France, une base de données relationnelle et spatiale a été développée au sein de l'IRSN. À ce stade, plus de 650 événements de tempête et/ou de submersion sur le littoral français et des pays voisins ont pu être recensés, sur une période s'étendant de 1500 à nos jours. En parallèle à l'élaboration de cette base de données, un groupe de travail interdisciplinaire s'est constitué. Il intègre des ingénieurs, chercheurs, statisticiens et historiens appartenant à différents organismes. Un axe majeur de travail est l'intégration de nouvelles données historiques issues de diverses archives dans la base de données, ainsi que leur interprétation et la quantification des niveaux marins associés.
This paper aims to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a historical study devoted to French nuclear power plants (NPPs) which can be prone to extreme coastal flooding events. It has been shown in the literature that the use of historical information (HI) can significantly improve the probabilistic and statistical modeling of extreme events. There is a significant lack of historical data on coastal flooding (storms and storm surges) compared to river flooding events. To address this data scarcity and to improve the estimation of the risk associated with coastal flooding hazards, a dataset of historical storms and storm surges that hit the Nord-Pasde-Calais region during the past five centuries was created from archival sources, examined and used in a frequency analysis (FA) in order to assess its impact on frequency estimations. This work on the Dunkirk site (representative of the Gravelines NPP) is a continuation of previous work performed on the La Rochelle site in France. Indeed, the frequency model (FM) used in the present paper had some success in the field of coastal hazards and it has been applied in previous studies to surge datasets to prevent coastal flooding in the La Rochelle region in France.In a first step, only information collected from the literature (published reports, journal papers and PhD theses) is considered. Although this first historical dataset has extended the gauged record back in time to 1897, serious questions related to the exhaustiveness of the information and about the validity of the developed FM have remained unanswered. Additional qualitative and quantitative HI was extracted in a second step from many older archival sources. This work has led to the construction of storm and coastal flooding sheets summarizing key data on each identified event. The quality control and the cross-validation of the collected in-formation, which have been carried out systematically, indicate that it is valid and complete in regard to extreme storms and storm surges. Most of the HI collected is in good agreement with other archival sources and documentary climate reconstructions. The probabilistic and statistical analysis of a dataset containing an exceptional observation considered as an outlier (i.e., the 1953 storm surge) is significantly improved when the additional HI collected in both literature and archives is used. As the historical data tend to be extreme, the right tail of the distribution has been reinforced and the 1953 "exceptional" event does not appear as an outlier any more. This new dataset provides a valuable source of information on storm surges for future characterization of coastal hazards.
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