Evaluating Flood Risk Increases from Sea Level Rise due to Global Warming

To estimate how global warming is shifting the odds of high storm surges, through sea level rise, we calculated the odds of extreme events in a hypothetical world with no past or future global sea level rise due to warming, to compare against our original calculations, which included warming.  We did this comparison at each water level station in the study. The approach basically translated to subtracting out the roughly 8 inches of historical global sea level rise measured from 1880-2009, and then also assuming no future global sea level rise, for the no-warming scenario at each station. The no-warming scenarios still included local sea level rise from factors other than warming, such as sinking or lifting land — the full local component of sea level rise as this section describes. 

We made one further adjustment, which was to add back 10% of the historic global sea level rise (10% of 8 inches), in the event that some of the observed historic rise has come from factors other than warming. Research on the sea level budget assigns the great majority of the 8 inches to warming-caused effects: expansion of the ocean as it has warmed, and the melting and calving of glaciers and ice sheets. Small fractions of global sea rise unaccounted for are widely viewed to come at least in part from additional ice loss. We assume 90% of the 8 inches are due to global warming, and thus deduct this amount for our comparison. 

For comparison of odds with and without warming, we used standard “100-year” or “century” floods as our reference, meaning water station water levels high enough that they have just a 1% chance of occurring in any given year.  We calculated the elevations 100-year floods reach when starting on top of baseline 2009 sea level at each station, using the same data and methods as for our overall water level probability projections.  Elevations were relative to average local high tide during a fixed past reference period, as with all elevations in related studies.

In comparing the odds of flood levels with and without global warming, we cut ratios off at three (tripling), because for many levels the odds are at or near zero without global warming. These situations create very large ratios whose exact values are meaningless: tiny changes in near-zero odds (odds without global warming) would lead to enormous changes in the ratio value.

This analysis did not address the possibility that storms might become more or less frequent or severe due to climate change. We also limited ourselves to looking at the total effects of global warming, and did not aim to separate fractions caused by humans versus natural variations. The strong scientific consensus points to people as causing most, if not all, of the average warming observed over the last century, and to being the dominant cause of future warming.

These methods, together with these and these, underlie the contrast made between scenarios with and without global warming in the Surging Seas report and its associated state factsheets  and data downloads.