Assessing Long-Term Flood Risk from Tropical Cyclones

Freshwater flooding is among the very top hazards of tropical cyclones, accounting for much of the loss of life and property damage associated with these storms. Yet tropical cyclones are infrequent enough that assessing flood risk from historical records is problematic. In this talk I will describe a new physics-based method of assessing flood risk, based on running thousands of simulations of tropical cyclones using a specialized tropical cyclone model driven by the coarse resolution output of climate models or reanalysis data sets. Enough simulations can be done to assess flood risk at 250 or even 500 year return intervals.