Analysis of the risk associated with coastal flooding hazards: a new historical extreme storm surges dataset for Dunkirk, France
<p>This paper aims to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a historical study devoted to French nuclear power plants (NPPs) which can be prone to extreme coastal flooding events. It has been shown in the literature that the use of historical information (HI) can significantly improve th...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2018-12-01
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| Series: | Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences |
| Online Access: | https://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/18/3383/2018/nhess-18-3383-2018.pdf |
| Summary: | <p>This paper aims to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a historical
study devoted to French nuclear power plants (NPPs) which can be prone to
extreme coastal flooding events. It has been shown in the literature that the
use of historical information (HI) can significantly improve the
probabilistic and statistical modeling of extreme events. There is a
significant lack of historical data on coastal flooding (storms and storm
surges) compared to river flooding events. To address this data scarcity and
to improve the estimation of the risk associated with coastal flooding
hazards, a dataset of historical storms and storm surges that hit the
Nord-Pas-de-Calais region during the past five centuries was created from
archival sources, examined and used in a frequency analysis (FA) in order to
assess its impact on frequency estimations. This work on the Dunkirk site
(representative of the Gravelines NPP) is a continuation of previous work
performed on the La Rochelle site in France. Indeed, the frequency model (FM)
used in the present paper had some success in the field of coastal hazards
and it has been applied in previous studies to surge datasets to prevent
coastal flooding in the La Rochelle region in France.</p><p>In a first step, only information collected from the literature (published
reports, journal papers and PhD theses) is considered. Although this first
historical dataset has extended the gauged record back in time to 1897,
serious questions related to the exhaustiveness of the information and about
the validity of the developed FM have remained unanswered. Additional
qualitative and quantitative HI was extracted in a second step from many
older archival sources. This work has led to the construction of storm and
coastal flooding sheets summarizing key data on each identified event. The
quality control and the cross-validation of the collected information, which
have been carried out systematically, indicate that it is valid and complete
in regard to extreme storms and storm surges. Most of the HI collected is in
good agreement with other archival sources and documentary climate
reconstructions. The probabilistic and statistical analysis of a dataset
containing an exceptional observation considered as an outlier (i.e., the
1953 storm surge) is significantly improved when the additional HI collected
in both literature and archives is used. As the historical data tend to be
extreme, the right tail of the distribution has been reinforced and the
1953 <q>exceptional</q> event does not appear as an outlier any more. This new
dataset provides a valuable source of information on storm surges for future
characterization of coastal hazards.</p> |
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| ISSN: | 1561-8633 1684-9981 |