Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2022

DOI

10.1029/2021GL096820

Publication Title

Geophysical Research Letters

Volume

49

Issue

2

Pages

e2021GL096820 (1-12 pp.)

Abstract

Amospheric rivers (ARs) effect inland hydrological impacts related to extreme precipitation. However, little is known about the possible coastal hazards associated with these storms. Here we elucidate high-tide floods (HTFs) and storm surges during ARs through a statistical analysis of data from the US West Coast during 1980-2016. HTFs and landfalling ARs co-occur more often than expected from random chance. Between 10%-63% of HTFs coincide with landfalling ARs, depending on location. However, only 2%-15% of ARs coincide with HTFs, suggesting that ARs typically must co-occur with anomalously high tides or mean sea levels to cause HTFs. Storm surges during ARs are interpretable in terms of local wind, pressure, and precipitation forcing. Meridional wind and barometric pressure are the primary drivers of the storm surge. This study highlights the relevance of ARs to coastal impacts, clarifies the drivers of storm surge during ARs, and identifies future research directions.

Rights

© 2022. The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Data Availability

Article states: "Tide-gauge data, tidal predictions, and station datum information are from the NOAA Tides and Currents Service (https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/). Reanalysis fields are from the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.html) and ECMWF (https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era-interim). The Gershunov et al. (2017) AR catalog are from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (https://weclima.ucsd.edu/data-products/). Codes used to produce the results in the main text are available through Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/5821773). The other ARTMIP Tier 1 data sets, considered in the Supporting Information, are from the Climate Data Gateway at NCAR (https://www.earthsystemgrid.org/dataset/ucar.cgd.ccsm4.artmip.tier1.html). ARTMIP is a grass-roots community effort and includes a collection of international researchers from universities, laboratories, and agencies. Cochairs and committee members include Jonathan Rutz, Christine Shields, L. Ruby Leung, F. Martin Ralph, and Michael Wehner, Ashley Payne, and Travis O’Brien. Details on catalogues developers can be found on the ARTMIP website. ARTMIP has received support from the US Department of Energy Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research (BER) as part of the Regional and Global Climate Modeling program, and the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) at Scripps Institute for Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego."

Original Publication Citation

Piecuch, C. G., Coats, S., Dangendorf, S., Landerer, F. W., Reager, J., Thompson, P. R., & Wahl, T. (2022). High-tide floods and storm surges during atmospheric rivers on the US West Coast. Geophysical Research Letters 49(2), Article e2021GL096820. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL096820

ORCID

0000-0002-3679-5234 (Dangendorf)

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