Tropical cyclone climatology change greatly exacerbates US joint rainfall-surge hazard Avantika Gori Princeton University Ning Lin (
[email protected] ) Princeton University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5571-1606 Dazhi Xi Princeton University Kerry Emanuel MIT https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2066-2082 Article Keywords: tropical cyclones, tropical cyclones climatology, rainfall-surge hazard Posted Date: August 24th, 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-805581/v1 License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Read Full License 1 Tropical cyclone climatology change greatly exacerbates US joint rainfall-surge 2 hazard 3 4 Avantika Gori1, Ning Lin*1, Dazhi Xi1, Kerry Emanuel2 5 1Princeton University, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering 6 2Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences 7 8 *Corresponding Author,
[email protected] 9 10 11 Abstract 12 Tropical cyclones (TCs) are among the largest drivers of extreme rainfall and surge, but 13 current and future TC joint hazard has not been well quantified. We utilize a physics-based 14 approach to simulate TC rainfall and storm tides and quantify their joint hazard under 15 historical conditions and a future (SSP5 8.5) climate projection. We find drastic increases in 16 the frequency of exceeding joint historical 100-yr hazard levels by 2100, with a 10-36 fold 17 increase along the southern US coast and 30-195 fold increase in the northeast. The joint 18 hazard increase is induced by sea-level rise and TC climatology change; the relative 19 contribution of TC climatology change is higher than that of sea-level rise for 96% of the 20 coast due to large increases in rainfall.