C3 Monthly Call-in and Webinar Meeting

Title/Presenter: Modeling Sea Level Rise Impacts on Storm Surges Along the Pacific Northwest Coast, Dr. Claudia Tebaldi, Climate Central

Description: Sound policies for protecting coastal communities, assets and fish and wildlife resources require good information about vulnerability to flooding. Claudia Tebaldi and colleagues investigated the influence of sea level rise on expected storm surge-driven water levels and their frequencies along the contiguous United States. This work was recently published and announced by Climate Central (along with other findings) and also received considerable media attention.

Claudia will explain the main drivers of local sea level rise, historic sea level in the Pacific Northwest, and results and findings from the recent modeling effort. The authors found that substantial changes in the frequency of what are now considered extreme water levels may occur even at locations with relatively slow local sea level rise. They estimate that, by mid-century, some locations in the Pacific Northwest may experience high water levels annually that would qualify today as ‘century’ extremes (i.e., having a chance of occurrence of 1% annually). Some sites will see century levels become ‘decadal’ (having a chance of 10% annually), and some will see substantially higher frequency of previously rare storm-driven water heights in the future.

Specifically, this research provides historic information and projections for continental U.S. tidal gauges including 6 in the Northwest. The webinar will emphasize these local impacts at:
-Coos Bay, OR
-Yaquina River, OR
-Astoria, OR
-Willapa Bay, WA
-Strait of Juan de Fuca, WA
-Seattle, WA

About the Presenter: Dr. Tebaldi comes to Climate Central from the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University, where she was a visiting investigator at the Department of Global Ecology. She was previously a Project Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and continues to collaborate with NCAR scientists. Her research focuses primarily on the statistical analysis of climate change models, focusing on the relation between their performance in simulating current climate and their reliability in predicting future climate change, especially at the regional level. She holds a Ph.D. in statistics from Duke University.