Storm Surges

In this post, I will be writing about storm surges. For my Coastal Management course, we were assigned to watch some videos related to storm surges. While working on the course, I said might as well create a blog post about it.

A storm surge is not directly related to rain but is related to wind, basically, the sea level rises so much that it causes extreme flooding. This is an outcome of hurricanes mostly. 

Sea level usually changes because of the gravitational rotation of the moon, sun, and earth. When in line, the forces combine to create the highest of the high tides and lowest of the low tides, which are referred to as “spring tides.” These occur every 14-15 days, during the full and new moons. When the forces are perpendicular to each other, the variation between high and low tide is at its least since the forces are pulling the water in different directions. This is referred to as a “neap tide,” and it occurs during the first and last quarters of the moon.

Another effect on the sea-level rise is the wind, where the wind transfers its momentum into the water which causes water to crash into the shoreline with high momentum. So the speed of wind would be simply equal to the speed of the water. But speed varies a lot inside a storm, intensity, direction, and size change so it is extremely difficult to measure that. 

By tracking the sea level rise and collecting the timing, extent, and magnitude data to analyze it. Some sea walls as barrier structures might help and ease the damage, as for infrastructures they should also be designed keeping in mind the maximum flooding caused by precipitation values with the storm surge flooding values. According to the Panel on Climate Change, frequency and intensity may change in the future. And as for frequency, it may be decreasing. But the intensity, which is the wind speed and rainfall amount, is most likely increasing because of greenhouse warming. 

Here is a nice video about storm surges;