• Energy Research

The ongoing rise in sea level affects tidal propagation and circulation in estuaries, and these changes can have far reaching consequences on the sediment dynamics, water quality and extreme water levels. This study aims at anticipating the evolution of the tidal dynamics in the Tagus (Portugal) in the 21st century, in particular due to sea level rise (SLR). The existence of a resonance mode of about 8 hours in this estuary, that selectively amplifies both semi-diurnal and quarter-diurnal tidal constituents, makes the response of the Tagus estuary to SLR unique. The study was conducted with a shallow water model, forced by present and future conditions, namely higher mean sea levels and an extrapolated bathymetry based on present sedimentation rates. Model results showed that SLR will significantly affect tidal asymmetry, in particular because the intertidal area can decrease by up to 40% by the end of the 21st century. As a result, the strong ebb-dominance of this estuary will decrease significantly. This evolution of tidal asymmetry will be counteracted by the effect of sedimentation of the salt-marsh areas. Also, SLR will enhance the resonance in the Tagus estuary. As a consequence, extreme water levels will be higher than the sum of present levels with the SLR.

There is a growing interest for marine flooding related to recent catastrophic events and their unintended consequences in terms of casualties and damages, and to the increasing population and issues along the coasts in a context of changing climate. Consequently, the knowledge on marine flooding has progressed significantly for the last years and this review, focused on storm-induced marine submersions, responds to the need for a synthesis. Three main components are presented in the review: (1) a state-of-the-art on marine submersions from the viewpoint of several scientific disciplines; (2) a selection of examples demonstrating the added value of interdisciplinary approaches to improve our knowledge of marine submersions; (3) a selection of examples showing how the management of future crises or the planning efforts to adapt to marine submersions can be supported by new results or techniques from the research community. From a disciplinary perspective, recent progress was achieved with respect to physical processes, numerical modeling, the knowledge of past marine floods and vulnerability assessment. At a global scale, the most vulnerable coastal areas to marine flooding with high population density are deltas and estuaries. Recent and well-documented floods allow analyzing the vulnerability parameters of different coastal zones. While storm surges can nowadays be reproduced accurately, the modeling of coastal flooding is more challenging, particularly when barrier breaches and wave overtopping have to be accounted for. The chronology of past marine floods can be reconstructed combining historical archives and sediment records. Sediment records of past marine floods localized in back barrier depressions are more adequate to reconstruct past flooding chronology. For the two last centuries, quantitative and descriptive historical data can be used to characterize past marine floods. Beyond providing a chronology of events, sediment records combined with geochronology, statistical analysis and climatology, can be used to reconstruct millennial-scale climate variability and enable a better understanding of the possible regional and local long-term trends in storm activity. Sediment records can also reveal forgotten flooding of exceptional intensity, much more intense than those of the last few decades. Sedimentological and historical archives, combined with high-resolution topographic data or numerical hindcast of storms can provide quantitative information and explanations for marine flooding processes. From these approaches, extreme past sea levels height can be determined and are very useful to complete time series provided by the instrumental measurements on shorter time scales. In particular, historical data can improve the determination of the return periods associated with extreme water levels, which are often inaccurate when computed based on instrumental data, due to the presence of gaps and too short time-series. Long-term numerical hindcast of tides and surges can also be used to provide the required time series for statistical analysis. Worst-case scenarios, used to define coastal management plans and strategies, can be obtained from realistic atmospheric settings with different tidal ranges and by shifting the trajectory of storms. Management of future crises and planning efforts to adapt to marine submersions are optimized by predictions of water levels from hydrodynamic models. Such predictions combined with in situ measurements and analysis of human stakes can be used to define a vulnerability index. Then, the efficiency of adaptation measures can be evaluated with respect to the number of lives that could be potentially saved. Numerical experiments also showed that the realignment of coastal defenses could result in water level reduction up to 1 m in the case where large marshes are flooded. Such managed realignment of coastal defenses may constitute a promising adaptation to storm-induced flooding and future sea level rise. From a legal perspective, only a few texts pay specific attention to the risk of marine flooding whether nationally or globally. Recent catastrophic events and their unintended consequences in terms of death and damages have triggered political decisions, like in USA after hurricane Katrina, and in France after catastrophic floods that occurred in 2010.

Surface gravity waves generated by winds are ubiquitous on our oceans and play a primordial role in the dynamics of the ocean–land–atmosphere interfaces. In particular, wind-generated waves cause fluctuations of the sea level at the coast over timescales from a few seconds (individual wave runup) to a few hours (wave-induced setup). These wave-induced processes are of major importance for coastal management as they add up to tides and atmospheric surges during storm events and enhance coastal flooding and erosion. Changes in the atmospheric circulation associated with natural climate cycles or caused by increasing greenhouse gas emissions affect the wave conditions worldwide, which may drive significant changes in the wave-induced coastal hydrodynamics. Since sea-level rise represents a major challenge for sustainable coastal management, particularly in low-lying coastal areas and/or along densely urbanized coastlines, understanding the contribution of wind-generated waves to the long-term budget of coastal sea-level changes is therefore of major importance. In this review, we describe the physical processes by which sea states may affect coastal sea level at several timescales, we present the methods currently used to estimate the wave contribution to coastal sea-level changes, we describe past and future wave climate variability, we discuss the contribution of wave to coastal sea-level changes, and we discuss the limitations and perspectives of this research field.

Rohmer, J.; Louisor, J.; Le Cozannet, G.; Naveau, P.; Thao, S., and Bertin, X., 2020. Attribution of extreme wave height records along the North Atlantic coasts using hindcast data: Feasibility and limitations. In: Malvarez, G. and Navas, F. (eds.), Global Coastal Issues of 2020. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 95, pp. 1268-1272. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.Extreme Event Attribution (EEA) aims at answering questions about how much climate change influenced the probability or intensity of a specific type of extreme meteo-oceanic event. Here, we focus on wave record breaking i.e. the occurrence of an extreme significant wave height (hs) value that exceeds all past observations. The objective is to evaluate the probability changes related to climate change by estimating the fraction of attributable risk far=1–p0/p1, where p0 and p1 are probabilities of the wave record event in two different worlds: a counterfactual world without anthropogenic forcings i.e. a “world that might have been”, and the factual world, i.e. “world that is.” To define these different worlds, we rely on a wave hindcast database, which provides very long time series (1900-2008) of hs over the whole North Atlantic Ocean Basin (NAOB). We assume that the counterfactual world corresponds to the series of annual hs maxima over the period 1900-1930, and that the factual world corresponds to the annual hs maxima over the period 1978-2008. The extreme event attribution approach dedicated to record breakings was applied over NAOB, and we show large far values (>0.5) along the northern Canadian, Scottish and southwestern Norwegian coasts (over the latitudes 50°-65°N). These results are, however, carefully discussed with respect to different uncertainty sources, namely the validity of the assumptions underlying the EEA, the statistical uncertainties, the use of hindcast data instead of global climate model's results, and the limitations in the hindcast database setup.