[Your shopping cart is empty

News

Map Shows US Cities That Could Be Underwater in 2050

Amap shows the growing threat to coastal cities across the United States due to rising sea levels.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s latest projections, sea levels along the U.S. coastlines are projected to rise, on average, around 10 to 12 inches by 2050.
Many communities along the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts face significant risks of partial inundation in the future if current trends continue and mitigation efforts are not intensified.
NOAA's Sea Level Rise Viewer shows which cities may be impacted along each coast, with dark blue areas indicating significant projected sea level rises.
Pacific Coast
Rising sea levels on the Pacific Northwest coast are likely to significantly affect major cities such as Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma in Washington and possibly Portland, Oregon.
In California, cities at risk include San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Concord, Fairfield, Freemont, Vallejo, San Mateo, Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Oakland, Oceanside and San Diego in the very south of the state.
Gulf Coast
Rising water levels are projected to affect the Gulf Coast states of Mississippi, Alabama (Mobile), Louisiana (New Orleans), Texas, and Florida. The latter two states see several cities potentially impacted, including Brownsville, Corpus Christi, Houston, and Beaumont in the Lone Star State and Tampa, St Petersburg, and Cape Coral in the Sunshine State.
Atlantic Coast
The NOAA map also shows that Florida's Atlantic coastal cities of Miami, Port St Lucie, Jacksonville, West Palm Beach, Pompano Beach, Palm Bay, and Palm Coast are at risk of rising sea levels.
NOAA also includes the rising sea level projections for the New England cities of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island, and Boston, Massachusetts.
The Southern cities of Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, Virginia Beach and Norfolk, Virginia, Wilmington, North Carolina, and Baltimore, Maryland, could also be affected.
Other states that could be impacted are Delaware, Maine, New Jersey and New York.
While it is highly unlikely that cities will go underwater in the near future, according to a NOAA oceanographer specialist, any rise that is two feet or more above the average high tide has the potential to be extremely destructive.
Dr. William Sweet, an NOAA oceanographer spearheading efforts to track and predict changes in sea level and coastal flood risk, told Newsweek that while he did not believe any communities in the U.S. would be going underwater by 2050, a longer-term outlook, 2150, for example, showed "episodic flooding become extremely damaging and a major concern unless we do something."
"Simple full moon tides, changes in prevailing winds in many locations cause what we call here at NOAA high tide flooding," said Sweet. "It could be sunny out, no storms, but a lot of the towns are starting to be affected by water in the streets, water coming up out of stormwater systems, and pooling up in communities."
"And that's going to happen more frequently, and that's going to be the 2150 with about a foot of sea level rise," he added. "And a lot of these East and Gulf Coast communities, the type of flooding that's occurring now, 5, 10 days per year or more in some of these communities, it's going to become just that much deeper and more severe in terms of impacts."
"With a foot of sea level rise or even a little bit more, in areas where there are high rates of land subsidence, which is the case in Texas, with the withdrawal of fossil fuel and groundwater for consumption, a foot, a foot and a half, perhaps, in areas doesn't put much underwater," Sweet said.
"It's not swallowing towns by any means, but what that map doesn't necessarily show is how about that's hitting two feet or three feet, episodic events. How much more frequent are they going to become?
"So, I think we need to unpack the idea of underwater versus water that reaches two or three feet above average high tide several times or a dozen or so more times a year. We can show you the stats.
"Instead of underwater referring to permanently underwater, it would be an increased frequency in these episodic flooding events that aren't necessarily associated with a storm. That's the way the sea level rise story is going to play out.
"Now if you go in the century and we're talking three, four, five feet of sea level rise...You might start saying, 'Where does this new high tide actually go?' And that's really what we use to delineate typically wet, typically dry what we call the inundation line. So, zero on the high tide sea level rise viewer is giving what we would call the differentiation between permanently wet...or inundation: This is flooded, and this isn't flooded," Sweet explained.
"So you can see with one foot it's not that much still, but it's the fact that it's allowing these episodic events to hit two or three feet higher than average high tide happening at a frequency that is problematic.
"That's not to say there's not going to be problems; there's already problems, and they are going to get worse by 2050 for sure unless we do something about it," said Sweet.
NOAA's Annual High Tide Flooding Outlook provides more information on this topic.
In an emailed statement to Newsweek referencing the threat that sea level rise poses to coastal cities, a spokesperson for Climate Central said: "It's partly why it's important that our maps illustrate projected coastal flood risk as well as the rising tideline.
"Tidelines have climbed higher along U.S. coasts in recent decades, exposing especially cities on the Gulf and east coasts to higher flood risks, sometimes even on sunny days. Seas are rising faster now, pushing storm surges higher and farther into places where coastal flood risks used to be much lower, and water levels are projected to rise even faster in the coming years.
"Miami, Charleston, Annapolis, and scores of other cities already see routine coastal flooding in low-lying areas, but even as more land slips beneath the tideline, the bigger threat to their futures comes from storms and the increasing frequency of coastal floods.
"Decades before neighborhoods are inundated by daily tides, they can expect to face mounting financial challenges from the costs to recover from saltwater floods, declining property values and tax bases, and the impacts on local businesses. Communities exposed to years of rising flood risks could be effectively ruined long before seawater regularly washes through their streets."
Newsweek

Dec 9, 2024 12:09
Number of visit : 43

Comments

Sender name is required
Email is required
Characters left: 500
Comment is required