Hazard assessment of storm events for The Battery, New York

Abstract

The environmental and socioeconomic importance of coastal areas is widely recognized, but at present these areas face severe weaknesses and high-risk situations. The increased demand and growing human occupation of coastal zones have greatly contributed to exacerbating such weaknesses. Today, throughout the world, in all countries with coastal regions, episodes of waves overtopping and coastal flooding are frequent. These episodes are usually responsible for property losses and often put human lives at risk. The floods are caused by coastal storms primarily due to the action of very strong winds. The propagation of these storms towards the coast induces high water levels. It is expected that climate change phenomena will contribute to the intensification of coastal storms. In this context, an estimation of coastal flooding hazards is of paramount importance for the planning and management of coastal zones. Consequently, carrying out a series of storm scenarios and analyzing their impacts through numerical modeling is of prime interest to coastal decision-makers. Firstly, throughout this work, historical storm tracks and intensities are characterized for the northeastern region of United States coast, in terms of probability of occurrence. Secondly, several storm events with high potential of occurrence are generated using a specific tool of DelftDashboard interface for Delft3D software. Hydrodynamic models are then used to generate ensemble simulations to assess storms' effects on coastal water levels. For the United States' northeastern coast, a highly refined regional domain is considered surrounding the area of The Battery, New York, situated in New York Harbor. Based on statistical data of numerical modeling results, a review of the impact of coastal storms to different locations within the study area is performed.

Numerical Modeling Tools Applied to Estuarine and Coastal Hydrodynamics: A User Perspective

“…And knowledge about the hydrodynamic patterns influenced by bottom morphological changes may allow assessment and forecasting of the effects of hazardous and extreme events, anthropogenic intervention, or climate change. Hydrodynamic modeling has therefore been the focus of a large number of previous works in estuarine environments [11,14,17,21,22,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50].…”

Hazard Assessment of Storm Events for the Portuguese Northern Coast

“…The same methodology presented in research from Gomes et al [14] was applied. In the first phase, data on the historical coastal storms that occurred near the Portuguese coast were collected using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [15] and Unisys Weather [16] databases as well as the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center's database.…”

“…For a three-dimensional shallow water model, the flow domain is made up of a horizontal plane of a limited area composed of open and closed boundaries, and in the vertical direction a number of layers are defined. The model's hydrodynamic formulation details are presented in the paper by Gomes et al [14]. It uses the alternating direction implicit (ADI) method to integrate shallow water equations in time.…”

“…It is at this point that the trailing ends of tropical cyclones become the most threatening in Portugal's case. In order to imitate trajectories that reach Western Europe, specifically the northern Portuguese coast, the first imposed limitation was that the latitude not surpass a certain limit, selected as 45 • N. Contrary to the case study seen in the paper by Gomes et al [14], the peak was in the latitudinal direction because during the high "hurricane season", occurring between August and October, the transition occurs between 40 • N and 50 • N [12]. The cyclones' paths were selected to begin at a random value between 36.5 • N and 44.8 • N latitude ( Figure 2).…”

Storm Surge Assessment Methodology Based on Numerical Modelling

“…With sea level rise associated with climate change the effects of coastal storms become worse (Santos et al, 2012). Another study related with storm surge occurrences in the northeastern United States coast, in Battery, New York (Gomes et al, 2015) allows to simulate with reasonable approximation the storm surges levels at this coastal location. The main objective of this work is to present a methodology for studying storm surge occurrences in the Portuguese coast, based on hydroinformatic tools.…”