The Influence of Sea Level Rise on the Regional Interdependence of Coastal Infrastructure

Abstract

Sea level rise (SLR) is placing both immediate and long‐term pressures on coastal communities to take protective actions. Projects in the United States, and in many locations throughout the world, generally involve local jurisdictions raising the elevation of shoreline protection elements, with limited or no analysis of the feedback between shoreline management decisions and the impacts to water levels regionally. Our study examines the impact of local shoreline development on regional flood risk and considers SLR scenarios up to 1.5 m using a large‐scale numerical model, as an example, for San Francisco Bay. Here we show that measures to prevent flooding along an embayment shoreline in one location or subregion may increase inundation elsewhere in the system. The network of interactions occurs not only within subbasins of the Bay but also across the greater geographic extent from one end of the Bay to the other, and local jurisdiction may have either reciprocal relationships with or asymmetric impacts on one other. Importantly, the nature of the interaction network is seen to evolve with SLR: interactions are purely subregional at current sea level but with higher sea level (e.g., 1 m of SLR), not only do the subregional interdependencies strengthen but also regional interdependences emerge.

Investigation of impact of shoreline alteration on coastal hydrodynamics using Dimension REduced Surrogate based Sensitivity Analysis

“…On the other hand, from Figure 3(a), (b), and (e), it can be seen that the construction of containments at Marin County, or Sonoma County, or Contra Costa County will have very small impact on the 340 variation of PWL in the entire bay. These results of strong and weak effects areconsistent with the local sensitivity study of Wang et al[21]. In their study, Variance-based sensitivity map with respect to x i (corresponding to each county)…”

“…As to Napa County, Figure 3 Figure 3(g) shows that the construction of containments at Santa Clara County will have localized impacts on the PWL in southern part 355 of the South SF Bay (SSFB) but at the same time moderate level of impacts on the rest of the bay. The main effects of these counties are shown more regional in the present global sensitivity study than the local sensitivity of Wang et al [21]. This indicates that the local sensitivity analysis underestimates the scale of the impacts.…”

“…This type of coastal protection infrastructure development can alter local hydrodynamics and spread to the adjacent region [6,14,1,10]. The resulting hydrodynamic interactions transform local actions into regional impacts, particularly in the future under more extreme SLR 10 scenarios [21]. As the impact of SLR on tidal dynamics is receiving increased concerns, there is a need to further our understanding in the hydrodynamic sensitivity to the shoreline alteration to guide the climate adaption activities in the coastal communities.…”

Real-time Analysis of City Scale Transportation Networks in New Orleans Metropolitan Area using an Agent Based Model Approach

“…Road closures and reduction in capacities are examples of influences on the weights or removal of edges which can affect the travel time, speed, and route of agents in the transportation model. In the Bay Area, high resolution numerical simulations have shown promise for studying the impact of sea level rise using hydrodynamics models [18]. The future study will use a hydrodynamic model to study the impact of extreme rain events such as 100-year flood as well as storms such as high category hurricanes on the Greater New Orleans metropolitan area.…”

Interacting Infrastructure Disruptions Due to Environmental Events and Long‐Term Climate Change

“…Shoreline protection meant to eliminate flooding in one location can exacerbate flooding elsewhere, such that decisions made about one shoreline segment have implications for others. This phenomenon has been observed in rivers (Doorn, 2015;Heine & Pinter, 2012), shelf systems (Song et al, 2013;Zhu et al, 2018), and tidal embayments (Holleman & Stacey, 2014;Lee et al, 2017;Lopes & Dias, 2015;Picado et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2018). In many systems, however, shoreline protection decisions are made with only consideration of the local threats of inundation, and regional interactions, either due to environmental physical processes or the cascading impacts on other infrastructure systems, are not usually considered.…”