On February 29th, 3pm UTC (4pm in Germany), Risk KAN organises a webinar on Compound Extremes. Avantika Gori, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University will talk about “ the role of climate change and development on hurricane compound hazard across spatial scales”. The topic is described as follows:
Tropical cyclones (TCs) are one of the largest threats to communities along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts due their extreme winds, storm surges, and rainfall. TC hazards coupled with dense urban development along the coastline have resulted in trillions in US damages over the past several decades, with an increasing trend in losses in recent years. So far, this trend has been driven mainly by increasing coastal development, which exposes property, assets, and infrastructure to TC hazards. However, as the climate continues to warm, sea-level rise and changing TC climatology may also cause large increases in coastal hazard in the future. The links between changing TC hazards and sea-levels and evolving coastal risk, as well as the combined impact of climate change and coastal development, is still largely unknown. Here, we quantify and project the magnitude and spatial pattern of TC compound risk across the US from wind, storm surge, and rainfall using statistical-dynamical TC downscaling, physics-based hazard models, and a county-level statistical damage model trained on historical TC data. We quantify the spatial distribution of current and future projected TC risk under a moderate (SSP2 4.5) emissions scenario. After investigating compound TC risk across the US, we focus on understanding compound flooding dynamics under climate change and urban growth in the Cape Fear River Estuary, NC. By coupling various hydrodynamic and hydraulic flood models and utilizing regional-scale climate and land use projections, we conduct a sensitivity study of compound flooding to changes in the climatology of storms, sea-level rise, and urban growth. We disentangle the relative contributions to compound flooding from each change factor and quantify their combined impact through a story-line approach. Our results demonstrate how climate change and socioeconomic development may cause large shifts in risk and hazard across large and small spatial scales.
You can find the flyer here.
In addition, you will find the newsletter Risk KAN: Compound Events for February 2024 here.