Broadscale coastal inundation modelling

Wu, XZ; Hall, JW; Liang, Q; Dawson, RJ

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-5258-0_8

Broadscale coastal inundation modelling

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Xingzheng Wu, Professor Jim Hall, Professor Qiuhua Liang, Professor Richard Dawson ORCiD

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Abstract

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015. All rights reserved. To understand the implications of changes to marine climates and the impact on people, analysis is required of the spatial extent and depths of flooding in urban and rural areas. Over extended timescales, the uncertainties related to possible sea-level rise and changes in storminess increase significantly. As such, there is no certainty regarding when and if a major storm or breach will occur. The increasing availability of some details of changing wave climate (described in Chaps. 2 and 3) and full range of beach evolutionary behaviours (given in Chap. 7) offer an opportunity to improve the implications of these uncertainties on flood extents. Uncertainties in beach level in front of flood defences, future sea level, extremes of wave height and water level and breach location(s) require that a wide range of current and potential future conditions are considered to fully understand flood risk. It is therefore crucial to capture and model a wide range of possible future inundation events. We simulated shallow flow hydrodynamics and validated this with a comparison of the recorded inundation extent from a flood event in 1938. Subsequently, with 1,344 simulations for each breaching scenario, we analyzed the full range of hydraulic loadings, beach morphologies, coastal defence structural responses (overtopping and breaching) and coastal management policy in order to understand the full range of uncertainties that influence long-term changes in flood impacts.