(Bloomberg) -- New York’s odds of being flooded by a one-two punch of extreme rain and surging seas have more than doubled in the past 80 years, a change scientists say may be linked to global warming.
The number of so-called compound flooding events -- combining heavy precipitation and a high storm surge -- have “increased significantly” for much of the coastal U.S., affecting cities from New York and San Francisco to Boston and Galveston, Texas, researchers said in a paper published Monday by the journal Nature Climate Change.
Researchers found an increased connection between storm surges and high precipitation, phenomena that forecasters and urban planners often treat as independent events when preparing for storms, said lead author Thomas Wahl. How much of the change is due to global warming or natural variation is unclear, but the data suggest policy makers should reconsider where they build infrastructure and how flood zones are drawn, Wahl said by telephone.
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