NSFGEO-NERC: CHANCE - understanding Compound flooding in the past, present and future for nortH AtlaNtic CoastlinEs

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Many populated coastal regions are vulnerable to multiple types of flooding. Storm surge and waves can impact coastal regions from the ocean and heavy precipitation can cause river and urban flooding. These kinds of flooding events have generally been considered independently, but it is well known that the same storms can produce multiple types of flooding. This project will address these multiple, coincidental flooding events, known as compound flooding. The main societal impact of the award will be in the areas of weather forecasting and risk management. The research team will engage other federal agencies, such as the Army Corps of Engineers and the US Geological Survey, to relay the results of the project to the infrastructure planning communities. This project also represents an international collaboration between scientists from the US and the UK.This project addresses the topic of compound flooding, where multiple flood drivers occur concurrently or in close succession. Compound flooding is especially impactful along coastlines, where storm surges, waves, river flooding, and direct runoff can combine to exacerbate potential flooding situations. The research team, including personnel from the UK and US, plan to conduct a variety of analyses, including dependence analyses, state-of-the-art weather typing approaches, multivariate extreme value analysis, and advanced ensemble hydrodynamic modelling to determine where and why compound flood events occur. The specific goals of the proposal are to: 1) Determine relevant variables that can lead to compound events along coastlines on both sides of the North Atlantic and assess the spatial footprints of the individual drivers; 2) Assess which large-scale weather types and other conditions led to the identified compound events in the past and determine if and how the frequency of compound events has changed in the past and may change in the future; 3) Quantify the likelihood of the occurrence of compound events along different stretches of coastline including relevant variables and spatial footprints; and 4) Integrate the results to quantify the extent to which compounding effects from multiple flood sources exacerbate impacts to coastal communities.This is a project that is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation's Directorate of Geosciences (NSF/GEO) and the National Environment Research Council (NERC) of the United Kingdom (UK) via the NSF/GEO-NERC Lead Agency Agreement. This Agreement allows a single joint US/UK proposal to be submitted and peer-reviewed by the Agency whose investigator has the largest proportion of the budget. Upon successful joint determination of an award, each Agency funds the proportion of the budget and the investigators associated with their own country.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.