Interactions, mechanisms and impact of future coastal urban flooding. A case study of Cork city

Abstract

In coastal floodplains, high river flows and high coastal water levels can result in extensive flooding. Mechanisms of flooding play a crucial role in flood characteristics with distinctive differences in flood wave propagation pattern and geographical extent of inundation. Climate change is expected to alter these flood mechanisms. This paper presents an assessment of urban inundation due to a combined effect of multiple source flooding. Cork City, a coastal city in the south of Ireland, frequently subject to complex coastal-fluvial flooding is used as a case study to investigate changes in flood mechanisms, dynamics and extents due to climate change. Interactions and dependencies between tides, surges and river discharges were computed to understand the likelihood of cooccurrence of compound drivers. The MSN Flood was used to predict potential future inundation patterns for a range of climate scenarios under various hydrological conditions. Scenarios were based on estimates of current, medium-range and high-end projections of extreme river flows and sea levels.