Measuring compound flood potential from river discharge and storm surge extremes at the global scale

Authors: Anaïs Couasnon and Dirk Eilander and Sanne Muis and Ted I E Veldkamp and Ivan D Haigh and Thomas Wahl and Hessel C Winsemius and Philip J Ward
Journal: Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
Year: 2020

The interaction between physical drivers from oceanographic, hydrological, and meteorological processes in coastal areas can result in compound flooding. Compound flood events, like Cyclone Idai and Hurricane Harvey, have revealed the devastating consequences of the co-occurrence of coastal and river floods. A number of studies have recently investigated the likelihood of compound flooding at the continental scale based on simulated variables of flood drivers, such as storm surge, precipitation, and river discharges. At the global scale, this has only been performed based on observations, thereby excluding a large extent of the global coastline. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap and identify regions with a high compound flooding po- tential from river discharge and storm surge extremes in river mouths globally. To do so, we use daily time series of river discharge and storm surge from state-of-the-art global mod- els driven with consistent meteorological forcing from reanalysis datasets. We measure the compound flood potential by analysing both variables with respect to their timing, joint statistical dependence, and joint return period. Our analysis indicates many regions that deviate from statistical indepen- dence and could not be identified in previous global studies based on observations alone, such as Madagascar, northern Morocco, Vietnam, and Taiwan. We report possible causal mechanisms for the observed spatial patterns based on existing literature. Finally, we provide preliminary insights on the implications of the bivariate dependence behaviour on the flood hazard characterisation using Madagascar as a case study. Our global and local analyses show that the depen- dence structure between flood drivers can be complex and can significantly impact the joint probability of discharge and storm surge extremes. These emphasise the need to refine global flood risk assessments and emergency planning to account for these potential interactions.

https://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/20/489/2020/

https://dx.doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-489-2020