Rising tides and coastal flooding

Color the relationship between sea level rise and coastal flooding on the Atlantic Coast

Data sources

Data source for nuisance flood levels

Sea Level Rise and Nuisance Flood Frequency Changes around the United States, page 5. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS). This data contains:

• Nuisance flood levels for 45 U.S. cities with NOAA stations
• Given in meters above Mean Higher High Water

Data source for sea level rise

Sea Level Trends. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS).

• Monthly mean sea levels of U.S. cities with NOAA stations
• Given in meters
• Covers 1935 to present

Data source for water inundation levels (for nuisance flood frequencies)

Inundation Analysis Tool. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS). This data contains:

• Daily measurements of water inundation levels of U.S. cities with NOAA stations
• Given in meters above Mean Higher High Water
• Covers 1935 to present

How the data was used

• The mean sea level was calculated for each of the three cities (Wilmington, Annapolis, Charleston) for each year between 1980 and 2015 and drawn as a bar chart
• The number of days where the water level was above the city’s nuisance flood level was calculated for each city for each year
• Each year for each city was assigned a color based on the number of days of nuisance flooding

Code

A python script is available in the code repository to generate or extend this activity, and can be run like this:

python nuisance.py

Which will create an svg file that contains mean sea level bar charts for each station with color labels that represent days of nuisance flooding for each year for each station. You can also add some optional parameters like this:

python nuisance.py -stations 8658120,8575512 -y0 1991 -y1 2016

In this example, it would show only two stations for years between 1991 and 2016