ArsTechnica: Climate-driven coastal flooding in the US likely to get worse suddenly

[DBoon]

Our warming planet is melting lots of ice and heating the waters of the oceans, creating a clear trend of rising oceans. In some areas of the US, this is starting to cause what's called nuisance flooding, where high tides cause coastal flooding even in the absence of storms. As the oceans continue to rise, figuring out what areas are likely to become vulnerable to coastal flooding and when is going to be critical to understanding how to manage coastal development.
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The data also makes apparent that the rising waters aren't evenly distributed around the year. For example, by 2050, Honolulu is expected to experience about 63 days of flooding a year. But nearly half of those days are likely to occur within a three-month period. This occurs both because factors that tend to cause flooding don't necessarily go away the next day and partly just because the average rate occurrence tends to occur lots of variation over the course of a year.

Overall, a number of conclusions can be drawn from this work. Right now, flooding from sea level rise is something that, unless you live in a handful of locations, you can ignore. But the authors estimate that, in a little over a decade, sea level rise will stop being a regional issue and become a widespread, national problem. And within a decade of that, a lot of places will have passed the inflection point and on a path of rapidly increasing flooding events.

Finally, all of this is based on low-to-moderate sea level rise scenarios. Should things happen faster than that, the time window we'll have before needing to deal with these problems is going to be considerably narrower.

All of that makes it essential that these floods are taken into consideration immediately. Infrastructure we are building at present is unlikely to reach its end of life before flooding becomes far more frequent. Housing, roads, and other facilities that we are currently using will likely need to be protected or abandoned. And coastal states may want to start setting aside money to deal with the flooding that will invariably occur.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/climate-driven-coastal-flooding-in-the-us-likely-to-get-worse-suddenly/