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Sea-Level Rise and Hazardous Storms: Impact Assessment on Coasts and Estuaries

Handbook of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

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Abstract

Sea-level changes at the coasts and in estuaries may differ substantially from global mean sea-level variations, showing complex spatial patterns which result from coastal-ocean dynamic processes, movements of the sea floor, and changes in gravity due to water mass redistribution. Because dominant hydrodynamic and morphodynamic processes in coastal and estuarine zones are unsteady and of multiscale, assessment of hazardous storm impacts under future sea-level rise scenarios relies heavily on numerical simulations of dynamic responses to sea-level rise and storm conditions. Thus, this chapter focuses on the following three objectives: (1) investigation of the impacts of hazardous storms/hurricanes and sea-level rise on coasts and estuaries, (2) review of impact assessment approaches by using numerical modeling simulations, and (3) demonstration of impact assessment of coastal floods and erosions under the combined conditions of hazardous storms (extreme events) and future sea-level rise scenarios. This emphasizes a systematic approach for the impact assessment of sea-level rise by using integrated coastal process models which are widely used to simulate coastal/estuarine hydrodynamic and morphodynamic processes to predict flooding/inundation and coastline erosion/deposition under complex hydrological, morphological, oceanographic, and meteorological conditions. This chapter also demonstrates an application of an integrated coastal model, CCHE2D-Coast, to simulate waves, tides, sediment transport, and morphological changes in an estuary and to predict the hydrodynamic and morphodynamic impacts of hazardous storms and five hypothetical sea-level rise scenarios. This simulation-based assessment approach shows that the integrated physical process modeling technique is the most effective method to predict the impact of spatially varying mean sea-level changes on coasts and in estuaries to facilitate coastal flood management, erosion protection, and infrastructure designing/planning against extreme hydrological conditions.

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Acknowledgments

This work was a product of the research partially sponsored by the National Center for Computational Hydroscience and Engineering at the University of Mississippi. The author thanks Keh-Chia Yeh at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, for providing the simulation conditions for the case study. Special thanks are given to Mary A. Cialone and Lihwa Lin for comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, Engineer Research and Development Center, US Army Corps of Engineers, 3909 Halls Ferry Road, 39180, Vicksburg, MS, USA

    Yan Ding

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  1. Yan Ding
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Correspondence to Yan Ding .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Mississippi Dept. Chemical Engineering, University, Mississippi, USA

    Wei-Yin Chen

  2. Advanced Manufacturing Research Inst. Functional Assembly Technology Group, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology (AIST), Nagoya, Japan

    Toshio Suzuki

  3. und Technische Biowissenschaften, TU Wien Inst. Verfahrenstechnik, Umwelttechnik, Wien, Austria

    Maximilian Lackner

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Ding, Y. (2017). Sea-Level Rise and Hazardous Storms: Impact Assessment on Coasts and Estuaries. In: Chen, WY., Suzuki, T., Lackner, M. (eds) Handbook of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6431-0_14-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6431-0_14-4

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  1. Latest

    Sea-Level Rise and Hazardous Storms: Impact Assessment on Coasts and Estuaries
    Published:
    29 May 2017

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6431-0_14-4

  2. Sea-Level Rise and Hazardous Storms: Impact Assessment on Coasts and Estuaries
    Published:
    11 November 2016

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6431-0_14-3

  3. Original

    Sea-Level Rise and Hazardous Storms: Impact Assessment on Coasts and Estuaries
    Published:
    18 March 2015

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6431-0_14-2

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