PW

P. J. Ward

18 records found

Due to rising sea levels and projected socio-economic change, global coastal flood risk is expected to increase in the future. To reduce this increase in risk, one option is to reduce the probability or magnitude of the hazard through the implementation of structural, Nature-base ...
State-of-the-art flood hazard maps in coastal cities are often obtained from simulating coastal or pluvial events separately. This method does not account for the seasonality of flood drivers and their mutual dependence. In this article, we include the impact of these two factors ...
Distributed hydrological models rely on hydrography data such as flow direction, river length, slope and width. For large-scale applications, many of these models still rely on a few flow direction datasets, which are often manually derived. We propose the Iterative Hydrography U ...
Exposure to coastal flooding is increasing due to growing population and economic activity. These developments go hand-in-hand with a loss and deterioration of ecosystems. Ironically, these ecosystems can play a buffering role in reducing flood hazard. The ability of ecosystems t ...
The interaction between physical drivers from oceanographic, hydrological, and meteorological processes in coastal areas can result in compound flooding. Compound flood events, like Cyclone Idai and Hurricane Harvey, have revealed the devastating consequences of the co-occurrence ...

Review article

Natural hazard risk assessments at the global scale

Since 1990, natural hazards have led to over 1.6 million fatalities globally, and economic losses are estimated at an average of around USD 260-310 billion per year. The scientific and policy communities recognise the need to reduce these risks. As a result, the last d ...
Current global riverine flood risk studies assume a constant mean sea level boundary. In reality high sea levels can propagate up a river, impede high river discharge, thus leading to elevated water levels. Riverine flood risk in deltas may therefore be underestimated. This paper ...
Flood risk is expected to increase in coastal cities, particularly in Asian megacities such as Shanghai. This paper presents an integrated modeling framework to simulate changes in the flood risk in Shanghai and provide a cost-benefit analysis of multiple adaptation strategies us ...
Over the past decade global flood hazard models have been developed and continuously improved. There is now a significant demand for testing global hazard maps generated by these models in order to understand their applicability for international risk reduction strategies and for ...
The western North-Atlantic coast experienced major coastal floods in recent years. Coastal floods are primarily composed of tides and storm surges due to tropical (TCs) and extra-tropical cyclones (ETCs). We present a reanalysis from 1988 to 2015 of extreme sea levels that explic ...
We assess the suitability of ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) data for the global modeling of tropical cyclone (TC) storm surges. We extract meteorological forcing from the IFS at a 0.225° horizontal resolution fo ...

Commentary

The need for a high-accuracy, open-access global DEM

A Commentary on 'The Need for a High-Accuracy, Open-Access Global DEM' by Schumann, G. J.-P., and Bates, P. D. (2018). Front. Earth Sci. 6:225. doi: 10.3389/feart.2018.00225@en

Disaster risk, climate change, and poverty

Assessing the global exposure of poor people to floods and droughts

People living in poverty are particularly vulnerable to shocks, including those caused by natural disasters such as floods and droughts. This paper analyses household survey data and hydrological riverine flood and drought data for 52 countries to find out whether poor people are ...
Global flood models (GFMs) are becoming increasingly important for disaster risk management internationally. However, these models have had little validation against observed flood events, making it difficult to compare model performance. In this paper, we introduce the first col ...
When river and coastal floods coincide, their impacts are often worse than when they occur in isolation; such floods are examples of ‘compound events’. To better understand the impacts of these compound events, we require an improved understanding of the dependence between coasta ...
Estimating the current risk of coastal flooding requires adequate information on extreme sea levels. For over a decade, the only global data available was the DINAS-COAST Extreme Sea Levels (DCESL) dataset, which applies a static approximation to estimate extreme sea levels. Rece ...

Compound simulation of fluvial floods and storm surges in a global coupled river-coast flood model

Model development and its application to 2007 Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh

Water-related disasters, such as fluvial floods and cyclonic storm surges, are a major concern in the world's mega-delta regions. Furthermore, the simultaneous occurrence of extreme discharges from rivers and storm surges could exacerbate flood risk, compared to when they occur s ...
Extreme sea levels, caused by storm surges and high tides, can have devastating societal impacts. To effectively protect our coasts, global information on coastal flooding is needed. Here we present the first global reanalysis of storm surges and extreme sea levels (GTSR data set ...