Brief communication: the role of using precipitation or river discharge data when assessing global coastal compound flooding

Bevacqua, E., Vousdoukas, M. I., Shepherd, T. G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6631-9968 and Vrac, M. (2020) Brief communication: the role of using precipitation or river discharge data when assessing global coastal compound flooding. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS), 20. pp. 1765-1782. ISSN 1684-9981 doi: 10.5194/nhess-20-1765-2020

Abstract/Summary

Interacting storm surges and high water-runoff can cause compound flooding (CF) in low-lying coasts and river estuaries. The large-scale CF hazard has been typically studied using proxies such as the concurrence of storm surge extremes either with precipitation or with river discharge extremes. Here the impact of the choice of such proxies is addressed employing state-of-the-art global datasets. Although being proxies of diverse physical mechanisms, we find that the two approaches show similar CF spatial patterns. However, deviations increase with the catchment size and our findings indicate that CF in long rivers (catchment > 5-10,000 Km2) is more accurately analysed using river discharge data. The precipitation-based assessment allows for considering local rainfall-driven CF, and CF in small rivers not resolved by large-scale datasets.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/90754
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	European Geosciences Union
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