Modeling the Combined Impact of Rainfall and Storm Tide on Coastal Cities under a Changing Climate: Transportation Infrastructure Impacts in Norfolk, Virginia USA as a Case Study

TL;DR

This study develops a comprehensive modeling system to assess the combined impact of rainfall and storm tide on coastal city infrastructure under climate change, demonstrating its application in Norfolk, Virginia, and highlighting the importance of advanced models for resilient planning.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled ocean-land surface modeling approach that captures combined flood effects and compares it with simpler methods, improving flood risk assessment accuracy under future climate scenarios.

Findings

Tidal flooding will dominate by 2070, causing daily nuisance flooding.

Coupled model predicts more accurate flood extents than bathtub method.

Nuisance flooding could cause over 4% link closure time in 2070.

Abstract

Low-lying coastal cities across the world are vulnerable to the combined impact of rainfall and storm tide. However, existing approaches lack the ability to model the combined effect of these flood mechanisms. Thus, to increase flood resilience, modeling techniques to improve understanding and prediction of the combined effect of these flood hazards are critical. To address this need, this study presents a modeling system for assessing the combined flood risk to coastal cities under changing climate conditions that leverages ocean modeling with land surface modeling capable of resolving urban drainage infrastructure within the city. The modeling approach is demonstrated in quantifying the future impact on transportation infrastructure within Norfolk, Virginia USA. A series of combined storms events are modeled for current (2020) and projected future (2070) climate conditions. Results show that pluvial flooding causes a larger interruption to the transportation network compared to tidal flooding under current climate conditions. By 2070, however, tidal flooding will be the dominant flooding mechanism with even nuisance flooding expected to happen daily due to SLR. In 2070, nuisance flooding is expected to cause a 4.6% total link close time (TLC), which is more than two times that of a 50-year storm surge (1.8% TLC) in 2020. The coupled model was compared with a widely used but physically simplistic bathtub method to assess the difference resulting from the more complex modeling presented. Results show that the bathtub method overestimated the flooded area near the shoreline by 9.5% and 3.1% for a 10-year storm surge event in 2020 and 2070, respectively, but underestimated flooded area in the inland region by 9.0% and 4.0% for the same events. The findings demonstrate the benefit of sophisticated modeling methods in climate adaptive planning and policy in coastal communities.