Earlier this year, a peer-reviewed paper, Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change, (PDF bypasses Nature’s paywall) was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The authors predicted more frequent storm surges for New York City due to the changing climate.
The abstract from the paper follows:
Storm surges are responsible for much of the damage and loss of life associated with landfalling hurricanes. Understanding how global warming will affect hurricane surges thus holds great interest. As general circulation models (GCMs) cannot simulate hurricane surges directly, we couple a GCM-driven hurricane model with hydrodynamic models to simulate large numbers of synthetic surge events under projected climates and assess surge threat, as an example, for New York City (NYC). Struck by many intense hurricanes in recorded history and prehistory, NYC is highly vulnerable to storm surges. We show that the change of storm climatology will probably increase the surge risk for NYC; results based on two GCMs show the distribution of surge levels shifting to higher values by a magnitude comparable to the projected sea-level rise (SLR). The combined effects of storm climatology change and a 1?m SLR may cause the present NYC 100-yr surge flooding to occur every 3–20?yr and the present 500-yr flooding to occur every 25–240?yr by the end of the century.
Many residents of the areas impacted by Sandy are still without power and in the most hard-hit locations probably won’t be back in their homes for quite some time. The next step for families is to look at some sort of disaster recovery plan. The costs of Sandy will most likely be in the billions of dollars. And – Sandy is only one of the more recent catastrophic weather events to occur globally. There is a climate crisis.