A new study from NOAA says that flooding may become a weekly event in some coastal areas of the U.S. Even without a storm, high tides are already flooding some coastal cities, including Miami and Norfolk, Virginia. And the NOAA study says that “sunny day flooding” will be more frequent in the future as ever-more-frequent storms make the problem worse. What is now a storm surge will be a normal high tide in the future. “The numbers are staggering,” says William Sweet, a NOAA oceanographer. “Today’s storm will be tomorrow’s high tide.”
As reported by NPR, the NOAA report says the rate of flooding is increasing in one-third of the areas they measured. “The problem is going to become chronic rather quickly,” Sweet said. “It’s not going to be a slow, gradual change.”
NOAA’s predictions for high tides assume that sea levels will rise from 1 ½ to 3 feet by 2100. And there are worse scenarios if the polar ice sheets melt more quickly than scientists have predicted in the past.
More severe high tides have serious implications for the military, particularly the Navy. The Center for Climate and Security says that 100 coastal military installations have reported flooding recently, and future flooding will threaten equipment, fuel depots, ammunition dumps, housing and docks.
The NOAA study, called “Patterns of High Tide Flooding Along the U.S. Coastline Using a Common Impact Threshold,” will be released soon.
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