Enabling dynamic modelling of coastal flooding by defining storm tide hydrographs

Abstract

Coastal flooding is driven by the combination of (high) tide and storm surge, the latter being caused by strong winds and low pressure in tropical and extratropical cyclones. The combination of storm surge and the astronomical tide is defined as the storm tide. To gain an understanding of the threat posed by coastal flooding and to identify areas that are especially at risk, now and in the future, it is crucial to accurately model coastal inundation. Most models used to simulate the coastal inundation scale follow a simple planar approach, referred to as bathtub models. The main limitations of this type of models are that they implicitly assume an infinite flood duration, and they do not capture relevant physical processes. In this study we develop a method to generate hydrographs called HGRAPHER, and we provide a global dataset of storm tide hydrographs based on time series of storm surges and tides derived from the Global Tide and Surge Model (GTSM) forced with the ERA5 reanalysis wind and pressure fields. These hydrographs represent the typical shape of an extreme storm tide at a certain location along the global coastline. We test the sensitivity of the HGRAPHER method with respect to two main assumptions that determine the shape of the hydrograph, namely the surge event sampling threshold and coincidence in the time of the surge and tide maxima. The hydrograph dataset can be used to move away from planar inundation modelling techniques towards dynamic inundation modelling techniques across different spatial scales.