Climate change impacts on flood risk and asset damages within mapped 100-year floodplains of the contiguous United States

Wobus, Cameron; Gutmann, Ethan; Jones, Russell; Rissing, Matthew; Mizukami, Naoki; Lorie, Mark; Mahoney, Hardee; Wood, Andrew W.; Mills, David; Martinich, Jeremy

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-2199-2017

Articles | Volume 17, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-2199-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-2199-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 12

Research article

|

08 Dec 2017

Research article |

| 08 Dec 2017

Climate change impacts on flood risk and asset damages within mapped 100-year floodplains of the contiguous United States

Cameron Wobus, Ethan Gutmann, Russell Jones, Matthew Rissing, Naoki Mizukami, Mark Lorie, Hardee Mahoney, Andrew W. Wood, David Mills, and Jeremy Martinich

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-2199-2017-supplement

Data sets

Hydrologic projections Archive Collaborators (see detailed list on the website) https://gdo-dcp. ucllnl.org/downscaled_cmip_projections/

Flood hazard datasets used for delineating 100-year floodplains FEMA https://msc.fema.gov/portal/advanceSearch

Census block data U.S. Census Bureau ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2010BLKPOPHU/

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Short summary

We linked modeled changes in the frequency of historical 100-year flood events to a national inventory of built assets within mapped floodplains of the United States. This allowed us to project changes in inland flooding damages nationwide under two alternative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scenarios. Our results suggest that more aggressive GHG reductions could reduce the projected monetary damages from inland flooding, potentially saving billions of dollars annually by the end of the century.