Understanding uncertainties in contemporary and future extreme wave events for broad-scale impact and adaptation planning.
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Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 36630499.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.ade3170 and PMC identifier 9833663.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Understanding uncertainties in extreme wind-wave events is essential for offshore/coastal risk and adaptation estimates. Despite this, uncertainties in contemporary extreme wave events have not been assessed, and projections are still limited. Here, we quantify, at global scale, the uncertainties in contemporary extreme wave estimates across an ensemble of widely used global wave reanalyses/hindcasts supported by observations. We find that contemporary uncertainties in 50-year return period wave heights ([Formula: see text]) reach (on average) ~2.5 m in regions adjacent to coastlines and are primarily driven by atmospheric forcing. Furthermore, we show that uncertainties in contemporary [Formula: see text] estimates dominate projected 21st-century changes in [Formula: see text] across ~80% of global ocean and coastlines. When translated into broad-scale coastal risk analysis, these uncertainties are comparable to those from storm surges and projected sea level rise. Thus, uncertainties in contemporary extreme wave events need to be combined with those of projections to fully assess potential impacts.