PCIC Science Brief: Storm Surges and Projected Changes to Atmospheric River Events In Coastal BC

PCIC's latest Science Brief highlights articles two recent research papers that focus on extreme weather events that affect coastal British Columbia. The first paper, by Soontiens et al. (2016) examines storm surges in the Strait of Georgia. The authors find that the model they use does well at reproducing the magnitude of storm surges and that the primary contribution to such events in the region are sea surface height anomalies from the Pacific. The second paper, by Hagos et al. (2016) examines changes to atmospheric river events over western North America, assuming a business-as-usual anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Their projections show an increase of about 35% in days on which atmospheric rivers make landfall and an increase of about 28% in extreme precipitation days by the end of the 21st century.

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Hagos, S. M., et al., 2016: A projection of changes in landfalling atmospheric river frequency and extreme precipitation over western North America from the Large Ensemble CESM simulations. Geophysical Research Letters, 43, 1357–1363, doi:10.1002/2015GL067392.

Soontiens et al., 2016: Storm Surges in the Strait of Georgia Simulated with a Regional Model. Atmosphere-Ocean, 54, 1, 1-21, doi:10.1080/ 07055900.2015.1108899.