Changes in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic and sea‐surge variations along the Belgian coast during the twentieth century

Ullmann, Albin; Monbaliu, Jaak

doi:10.1002/joc.1904

Cited by 24 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 39 publications

(48 reference statements)

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“…Thus, the statistically significant relationships identified here may be related to weather regime-driven modulation of incoming wave energy. Change in water level induced by weather regime-driven variations of sea-level pressure (Barrier et al 2013) and/or onshore winds (Ullmann and Moron 2008;Ullmann and Monbaliu 2010) may also impact shoreline change as storm wave events coinciding with higher water levels result in higher rates of erosion (Ruggiero et al 2001;Serafin and Ruggiero 2014). However, this was not verified here as it is beyond the scope of this study.…”

Section: Model Resultsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Statistical modeling of interannual shoreline change driven by North Atlantic climate variability spanning 2000–2014 in the Bay of Biscay

et al. 2016

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Modeling studies addressing daily to interannual coastal evolution typically relate shoreline change with waves, currents and sediment transport through complex processes and feedbacks. For wave-dominated environments, the main driver (waves) is controlled by the regional atmospheric circulation. Here a simple weather regime-driven shoreline model is developed for a 15-year shoreline dataset (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014) collected at Truc Vert beach, Bay of Biscay, SW France. In all, 16 weather regimes (four per season) are considered. The centroids and occurrences are computed using the ERA-40 and ERA-Interim reanalyses, applying k-means and EOF methods to the anomalies of the 500-hPa geopotential height over the North Atlantic Basin. The weather regime-driven shoreline model explains 70% of the observed interannual shoreline variability. The application of a proven wavedriven equilibrium shoreline model to the same period shows that both models have similar skills at the interannual scale. Relation between the weather regimes and the wave climate in the Bay of Biscay is investigated and the primary weather regimes impacting shoreline change are identified. For instance, the winter zonal regime characterized by a strengthening of the pressure gradient between the Iceland low and the Azores high is associated with high-energy wave conditions and is found to drive an increase in the shoreline erosion rate. The study demonstrates the predictability of interannual shoreline change from a limited number of weather regimes, which opens new perspectives for shoreline change modeling and encourages long-term shoreline monitoring programs.

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Section: Model Resultsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Statistical modeling of interannual shoreline change driven by North Atlantic climate variability spanning 2000–2014 in the Bay of Biscay

et al. 2016

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“…Extreme events, however, determine an additional hazard component. Some studies report an increased intensity and frequency of extreme water levels along several coastal regions in the world (Izaguirre et al 2013;Ullmann and Monbaliu 2010;Wang et al 2014;Weisse et al 2014). However, the majority of the observed changes are related to changes in mean sea level (Menéndez and Woodworth 2010), while there is Abstract Storm surges are an important coastal hazard component and it is unknown how they will evolve along Europe's coastline in view of climate change.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Projections of extreme storm surge levels along Europe

et al. 2016

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the exception of RCP8.5 under which a moderate increase is projected towards the end of the century. The present findings indicate that the anticipated increase in extreme total water levels due to relative sea level rise (RSLR), can be further enforced by an increase of the extreme SSL, which can exceed 30 % of the RSLR, especially for the high return periods and pathway RCP8.5. This implies that the combined effect could increase even further anticipated impacts of climate change for certain European areas and highlights the necessity for timely coastal adaptation and protection measures. The dataset is publicly available under this link: http://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ collection/LISCOAST.

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“…Since storm surges are generated by low atmospheric pressure and intense winds over the ocean, surges generally exhibit a comprehensive, independent, and more homogeneous archive (Zhang et al 2000) of information about storminess. Although some tide gauge records reach back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, storm surge records have been surprisingly rarely analyzed in the last decades and earlier assessments in the North Sea region just focused on the twentieth century (Ullmann and Monbaliu 2010). This is mainly attributed to the limited availability of continuous hourly measurements, which are required for a harmonic analysis in order to remove the deterministic tidal water level components from the tide gauge data (Pawlowicz et al 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

North Sea Storminess from a Novel Storm Surge Record since AD 1843*

et al. 2014

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The detection of potential long-term changes in historical storm statistics and storm surges plays a vitally important role for protecting coastal communities. In the absence of long homogeneous wind records, the authors present a novel, independent, and homogeneous storm surge record based on water level observations in the North Sea since 1843. Storm surges are characterized by considerable interannual-to-decadal variability linked to large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. Time periods of increased storm surge levels prevailed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries without any evidence for significant long-term trends. This contradicts with recent findings based on reanalysis data, which suggest increasing storminess in the region since the late nineteenth century. The authors compare the wind and pressure fields from the Twentieth-Century Reanalysis (20CRv2) with the storm surge record by applying state-of-the-art empirical wind surge formulas. The comparison reveals that the reanalysis is a valuable tool that leads to good results over the past 100 yr; previously the statistical relationship fails, leaving significantly lower values in the upper percentiles of the predicted surge time series. These low values lead to significant upward trends over the entire investigation period, which are in turn supported by neither the storm surge record nor an independent circulation index based on homogeneous pressure readings. The authors therefore suggest that these differences are related to higher uncertainties in the earlier years of the 20CRv2 over the North Sea region.

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Changes in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic and sea‐surge variations along the Belgian coast during the twentieth century

Cited by 24 publications

References 39 publications

Statistical modeling of interannual shoreline change driven by North Atlantic climate variability spanning 2000–2014 in the Bay of Biscay

Statistical modeling of interannual shoreline change driven by North Atlantic climate variability spanning 2000–2014 in the Bay of Biscay

Projections of extreme storm surge levels along Europe

North Sea Storminess from a Novel Storm Surge Record since AD 1843*

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