Development of a Laboratory-Scale Coastal-Inland Flood Simulator for Prince Edward Island

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In recent years, global warming has intensified extreme precipitation and caused unprecedented sea level rise around the world. As an island province in Atlantic Canada, PEI has been threatened by increasing coastal-inland flooding risks and the island has been shrinking at a faster rate than previously thought due the severe coastal erosion. This has become especially obvious after recent unprecedented post-tropical storms (e.g., Hurricane Fiona in 2022 and Hurricane Dorian in 2019). How to protect the island from coastal erosion and build climate-resilient coastal communities has become one of the most important questions to be addressed in PEI. Therefore, the objective of this project is to develop a state-of-the-art laboratory-scale coastal-inland flood simulator (CIFS) for PEI to facilitate holistic flood risk assessment by estimating the combined effects of rising sea levels, intensified storm surges, and increasing inland floods caused by intense rainfall. The CIFS system will support the planning of coastal adaptation measures, evaluation of the effectiveness of different coastal protection measures, as well as operational and emergency management of flooding events. The core of the CIFS system will comprise two independent models - a coastal model and an inland model - that can run separately or together to carry out flood risk analyses for different climate change scenarios. The coastal model will be equipped to simulate potential changes in nearshore waves and storm surge activities across PEI under different climate change scenarios, while the inland model will be capable of simulating urban and overland flooding caused by different sources, including heavy rainfall, and their interactions with rising sea levels. The proposed CIFS system will be the first of its kind in Canada to support the laboratory-scale simulation and demonstration of combined coastal and inland flood events. Given the increasing coastal-inland flooding risks that PEI has been facing over the past years, the proposed CIFS platform is urgently needed to allow the research team in the Canadian Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation at UPEI to find some sustainable solutions to protect the island from coastal erosion.