“We wanted to look at the impact of climate change on sea level and storm characteristics to see how that has affected the storm surge on the Atlantic coast, specifically in New York City”, said Andra Reed, one of the researchers, in a news release.
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The study is in part of the commemoration of hurricane Sandy, which struck New York and New Jersey three years ago, killing dozens of people and an estimated $50 billion worth of damage in infrastructures. The study advocates better risk management strategies to cope with storms.
When a storm weather system is over the sea, its low pressure centre pulls up the surface of the water. This is a storm surge. The severity of flooding depends on the height of this “storm surge” and the baseline sea level. New Yorkers can thank a combination of sea level rise and more extreme storm events for their flood-filled future. Flood heights have also dramatically increased.
Before Hurricane Sandy, the largest recorded surge in New York City’s Battery Park area was a 10 foot surge that occurred in 1938. However, the record of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic basin is too short to draw meaningful conclusions, from 1851 to the present. Although about 60% Americans say they own life insurance, the same percentage of renters lack renter’s insurance, according to two separate surveys by Princeton Survey Research Associations global on behalf of personal finance site Bankrate.com.
Flooding in Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn as a result of Hurricane Sandy. The result for New York is bad.
“Flood risk has greatly increased for the region” in the anthropogenic era, or 1970 to 2005, the study’s authors wrote in its abstract.
To reconstruct sea levels for earlier periods, the research team used microfossils, called foraminifera, that were preserved in sediment cores from coastal salt marshes in Cape May Court House and Galloway, New Jersey. The relative rise during the pre-anthropogenic era (blue dashed line) is largely down to natural causes, such as melting glaciers since the end of the last ice age, and the land surface subsiding, Reed says.
Adam Sobel, atmospheric scientist at Columbia University, said the study like several other studies leaves little doubt that sea level rise will be more rapid than it has been in past. As a effect, the study found that the average storm surge during the anthropogenic era was 1.24 meters higher than during the prior, and much longer, period.
Researchers said a storm surge like the one similar to that of 2012 that made its way through the barricades, swamping roadways and flooding subway tunnels, could happen again.
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Researchers however chose this time to highlight the facts impeding to the floods. And store this information in a safe deposit box at a bank, so it doesn’t also get destroyed if it’s hit by a storm.
