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Long-term trends in storm surge climate derived from an ensemble of global surge reconstructions
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  • Michael Getachew Tadesse,
  • Thomas Wahl,
  • Md Mamunur Rashid,
  • Sönke Dangendorf,
  • Alejandra R. Enríquez,
  • Stefan Andreas Talke
Michael Getachew Tadesse
Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering & National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Thomas Wahl
Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering & National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA
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Md Mamunur Rashid
Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering & National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA
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Sönke Dangendorf
Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Science, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
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Alejandra R. Enríquez
Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering & National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA
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Stefan Andreas Talke
Civil and Environmental Engineering, California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, California
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Abstract

We investigate trends in the magnitude and frequency of extreme storm surge events at 320 tide gauges across the globe from 1930, 1950, and 1980 to present. We use two centennial and three satellite-era daily storm surge time series from the Global Storm Surge Reconstructions (GSSR) database. Before calculating trends, we perform change point analysis to identify and remove data where inhomogeneities in atmospheric reanalysis products could lead to spurious trends in the storm surge data. Even after removing unreliable data, the database still extends existing storm surge records by several decades for most of the tide gauges. Storm surges derived from the centennial 20CR and ERA-20C atmospheric reanalyses show consistently significant positive trends along the southern North Sea and the Kattegat Bay regions during the periods from 1930 and 1950 onwards and negative trends since 1980 period. When comparing all five storm surge reconstructions and observations for the overlapping 1980-2010 period we find overall good agreement, but distinct differences along some coastlines, such as the Bay of Biscay and Australia. We also assess changes in the frequency of extreme surges and find that the number of annual exceedances above the 95th percentile has increased since 1930 and 1950 in several regions such as Western Europe, Kattegat Bay, and the US East Coast.