Dataset Information

A Validated Tropical-Extratropical Flood Hazard Assessment for New York Harbor.

ABSTRACT: Recent studies of flood risk at New York Harbor (NYH) have shown disparate results for the 100-year storm tide, providing an uncertain foundation for the flood mitigation response after Hurricane Sandy. Here, we present a flood hazard assessment that improves confidence in our understanding of the region's present-day potential for flooding, by separately including the contribution of tropical cyclones (TCs) and extratropical cyclones (ETCs), and validating our modeling study at multiple stages against historical observations. The TC assessment is based on a climatology of 606 synthetic storms developed from a statistical-stochastic model of North Atlantic TCs. The ETC assessment is based on simulations of historical storms with many random tide scenarios. Synthetic TC landfall rates and the final TC and ETC flood exceedance curves are all shown to be consistent with curves computed using historical data, within 95% confidence ranges. Combining the ETC and TC results together, the 100-year return period storm tide at NYH is 2.70 m (2.51-2.92 at 95% confidence), and Hurricane Sandy's storm tide of 3.38 m was a 260-year (170-420) storm tide. Deeper analyses of historical flood reports from estimated Category-3 hurricanes in 1788 and 1821 lead to new estimates and reduced uncertainties for their floods, and show that Sandy's storm tide was the largest at NYH back to at least 1700. The flood exceedance curves for ETCs and TCs have sharply different slopes due to their differing meteorology and frequency, warranting separate treatment in hazard assessments.

SUBMITTER: Orton PM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6839700 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

A Validated Tropical-Extratropical Flood Hazard Assessment for New York Harbor.

Orton P M PM Hall T M TM Talke S A SA Blumberg A F AF Georgas N N Vinogradov S S

Journal of geophysical research. Oceans 20161201 Iss 12

Recent studies of flood risk at New York Harbor (NYH) have shown disparate results for the 100-year storm tide, providing an uncertain foundation for the flood mitigation response after Hurricane Sandy. Here, we present a flood hazard assessment that improves confidence in our understanding of the region's present-day potential for flooding, by separately including the contribution of tropical cyclones (TCs) and extratropical cyclones (ETCs), and validating our modeling study at multiple stages ...[more]

PMID: 31709133

Similar Datasets

Project description:In densely developed port areas with numerous emissions sources, relating measured air quality changes to emissions is challenging given the geographic density of sources without unique pollutant composition signatures. To better understand air quality during increasing emission controls at the Port of New York and New Jersey ("Port"), an air monitoring station was sited to minimize collinearity of sources along ordinal directions. The study area includes an international airport, interstate highway, port terminals and shipping lanes, and industrial sources, as well as typical urban emissions of a megacity. Because air flow travel time from sources to the monitor were usually much less than one hour, minute-by-minute, high-precision data were collected for three years (2013-2015) for sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO), oxides of nitrogen (NO, NO2), black carbon (BC), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), and meteorology (wind speed, wind direction, temperature, humidity). From summer 2014 to spring 2015, hourly metals data were also collected. A high degree of temporal variability was observed for pollutants associated with direct emissions, with highest hourly average coefficient of variation observed for NO (2.65), SO2 (1.45) and BC (1.21). Nonparametric trajectory analysis (NTA) was utilized to separate the source areas influencing the monitoring data and observe how they changed over time, with over 1.6 million trajectories computed in total. Comparing the last 5 quarters of the study to the first 5 quarters, concentrations at the monitoring site associated with three port-related geographic areas decreased by 34-41%, 11-17%, and 28-41% for SO2, NOx, and BC, respectively. Over the same period, indicators of shipping and cargo activity at the port remained relatively constant; therefore, a shift in emission factors is likely the cause of the change. This study demonstrates the value of high-time resolution, accurate monitoring data along with careful siting to understand source area influences.

Dataset Information

A Validated Tropical-Extratropical Flood Hazard Assessment for New York Harbor.

Publications

A Validated Tropical-Extratropical Flood Hazard Assessment for New York Harbor.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets