Speaker: Assistant Professor Talea Mayo, Emory University
Date and Time: September 16, 2:00-3:00 p.m.
Location: Scheller, Room 102
Host: CSE Assistant Professor Florian Schäfer

Title: Climate change impacts on hurricane storm surge risk.

Abstract: It is widely accepted that climate change will cause global mean sea level rise and increase coastal flood risk in many places. However, climate change also has significant implications for tropical cyclone climatology. Specifically, hurricane intensity, size, and translation speed are all expected to intensify in the future, and each of these influences storm surge generation and propagation. Computational modeling plays a vital role in investigating the impacts of these unobserved changes on storm surges. In this seminar, I'll discuss two computational modeling approaches we've taken to understanding what this means for storm surge risk.

In the first approach, we use a statistical/deterministic hurricane model along with the computational hydrodynamic model, SLOSH, to simulate synthetic storm surges for coastal communities along the U.S. North Atlantic. We use extreme value analysis to determine probability distributions of storm tide, and integrate probability distributions of local sea level rise to understand the present day flood risk and how it may change over the next century. We find that for most of the observed regions flood risk can be expected to increase by a factor of 10. In the second approach, we use the convection permitting regional climate model, WRF, and the high fidelity computational storm surge model, ADCIRC, to simulate historical storm surges that impacted the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Coasts of the continental United States from 2000-2013. We then simulate the same storm surges under projected end of century climate conditions to assess the impact of climate change on storm surge inundation. We find that the volume of inundation increases for over half of the simulated storms and the average change for all storms is +36%, with notable increases in inundation occur near Texas, Mississippi, the Gulf Coast of Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, and New York.

Bio: Talea Mayo is a computational mathematician with expertise in the development and application of numerical hydrodynamic models for coastal hazards.  She specializes in hurricane storm surge modeling, including the investigation of climate change impacts on coastal flood risk and data assimilation methods for state and parameter estimation. She has also used numerical models to investigate wave energy conversion and its impacts on coastal erosion. Mayo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Emory University, and was awarded the Early-Career Research Fellowship by the National Academies of Sciences Gulf Research Program and the Early Career Faculty Innovator Award by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. She is a fierce advocate of accessible, inclusive science and education of all people.