Analysis of potential impacts on coastal areas due to changes in wave conditions

Sierra, Joan Pau; Casas-Prat, Mercè

doi:10.1007/s10584-014-1120-5

Cited by 41 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Another simplification to reduce the computational effort to assess the climate change coastal impacts consists in using empirical formulations or indicators as an alternative solution to process based models. For example, climate change wave variations in coastal processes or port operability are assessed using empirical expressions and introducing wave changes as a percentage of increase/decrease from global projections [ Sierra and Casas‐Prat , ]. Coastal flooding can be analyzed through the proxy total water level (TWL) which accounts the astronomical tide (AT), the SS and the wave set‐up referenced to mean sea level [ Rueda et al ., ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical wave climate projections for coastal impact assessments

et al. 2017

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Global multimodel wave climate projections are obtained at 1.0° × 1.0° scale from 30 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) global circulation model (GCM) realizations. A semi‐supervised weather‐typing approach based on a characterization of the ocean wave generation areas and the historical wave information from the recent GOW2 database are used to train the statistical model. This framework is also applied to obtain high resolution projections of coastal wave climate and coastal impacts as port operability and coastal flooding. Regional projections are estimated using the collection of weather types at spacing of 1.0°. This assumption is feasible because the predictor is defined based on the wave generation area and the classification is guided by the local wave climate. The assessment of future changes in coastal impacts is based on direct downscaling of indicators defined by empirical formulations (total water level for coastal flooding and number of hours per year with overtopping for port operability). Global multimodel projections of the significant wave height and peak period are consistent with changes obtained in previous studies. Statistical confidence of expected changes is obtained due to the large number of GCMs to construct the ensemble. The proposed methodology is proved to be flexible to project wave climate at different spatial scales. Regional changes of additional variables as wave direction or other statistics can be estimated from the future empirical distribution with extreme values restricted to high percentiles (i.e., 95th, 99th percentiles). The statistical framework can also be applied to evaluate regional coastal impacts integrating changes in storminess and sea level rise.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical wave climate projections for coastal impact assessments

et al. 2017

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“…The potential coastal and near-shore impacts of climate change driven variations of wind-wave properties have gathered increased attention in recent years (Coelho et al, 2009;Zacharioudaki and Reeve, 2011;Adams et al, 2011;Plecha et al, 2012;Barnard et al, 2014;Sierra and Casas-Prat, 2014). As a consequence, researchers have increasingly taken results from global climate models (GCMs) participating in the World Climate Research Programme's Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phases 3 (CMIP3) and 5 (CMIP5) to infer global or regional wind-wave climate changes, using both statistical (e.g., Wang et al, 2014;Casas-Prat et al, 2014;Laugel et al, 2014) and dynamical approaches (e.g., Dobrynin et al, 2012;Hemer et al, 2013a;Laugel et al, 2014;Fan et al, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of a CMIP5 derived dynamical global wind wave climate model ensemble

2016

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Much effort has gone into evaluating the skill of General Circulation Models (GCMs) for 'standard' climate variables such as surface (air and/or sea) temperature, or precipitation. Whether climate model skill to simulate standard variables translates to the performance of dynamical GCM forced wind-wave simulations is yet to be established. We assess an ensemble of historical dynamical wave climate simulations whereby surface winds taken from GCMs participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) are used to force a spectral wave model. The GCMs used include 8 CMIP5 models and 2 dynamically downscaled CMIP3 models. The climatological properties of key integrated wave parameters (significant wave height, maximum wave height, mean wave period and direction) are evaluated, using two independent methods, relative to three historical wave hindcast/reanalysis datasets over 13 areas of the global ocean. We identify that high performance of GCMs for 'standard' climate variables does not imply high performance for GCM forced wave simulations. We also identify there is little to no benefit in choosing a higher resolution CMIP5 GCM (with resolution of ~1.4degrees) over a lower resolution GCM (~2.8 degree) to improve skill of GCM forced dynamical wave simulations. With the conscious push towards developing projections of waves and storm surges to aid assessments of possible climate driven impacts to coastal communities, we stress the need to evaluate the performance of a

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“…Also, changes in wave period or direction would affect propagation processes such as shoaling, refraction and diffraction. Therefore they could induce changes in sediment transport patterns (potentially generating siltation) or wave penetration into harbours (Sierra and Casas-Prat, 2014), which, in turn, would affect port operability. The activities in the harbour areas are strongly dependent on wave conditions, especially in relationship with the entrance and exit of the ships in safe conditions, but also for the regular harbour operations (Rusu and Guedes Soares, 2013), including ship mooring and cargo loading/unloading.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts on wave-driven harbour agitation due to climate change in Catalan ports

Sierra

Casas-Prat

Virgili

et al. 2015

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. The objective of the present work is to analyse how changes in wave patterns due to the effect of climate change can affect harbour agitation (oscillations within the port due to wind waves). The study focuses on 13 harbours located on the Catalan coast (NW Mediterranean) using a methodology with general applicability. To obtain the patterns of agitation, a Boussinesq-type model is used, which is forced at the boundaries by present/future offshore wave conditions extracted from recently developed high-resolution wave projections in the NW Mediterranean. These wave projections were obtained with the SWAN model forced by present/future surface wind fields projected, respectively, by five different combinations of global and regional circulation models (GCMs and RCMs) for the A1B scenario. The results show a general slight reduction in the annual average agitation for most of the ports, except for the northernmost and southernmost areas of the region, where a slight increase is obtained. A seasonal analysis reveals that the tendency to decrease is accentuated in winter. However, the inter-model variability is large for both the winter and the annual analysis. Conversely, a general increase with a larger agreement among models is found during summer, which is the period with greater activity in most of the studied ports (marinas). A qualitative assessment of the factors of variability seems to indicate that the choice of GCM tends to affect the spatial pattern, whereas the choice of RCM induces a more homogeneous bias over the regional domain.

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Analysis of potential impacts on coastal areas due to changes in wave conditions

Cited by 41 publications

References 27 publications

Statistical wave climate projections for coastal impact assessments

Statistical wave climate projections for coastal impact assessments

Evaluation of a CMIP5 derived dynamical global wind wave climate model ensemble

Impacts on wave-driven harbour agitation due to climate change in Catalan ports

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