Study suggests 100-year floods are happening every 30 years
The term "100-year flood" is given to a flood event that has a 1 in 100 chance, or 1 per cent probability, of occurring in a given year.
A new study from Princeton suggests 100-year floods happen every 1 to 30 years along the southeast Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico and could become an annual occurrence in New England.
"The historical 100-year floods may change to one-year floods in Northern coastal towns in the U.S.," Ning Lin, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University and lead author on the study, said in a statement.
For the paper, researchers combined storm surge, sea-level rise, and the predicted increased occurrence and strength in tropical storms and hurricanes, to create a new flood hazard map for the U.S. East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico.
Reza Marsooli, assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology and a contributing author, said the predictions are more accurate than existing forecasts because the team analyzed several variables that are usually addressed separately.
"The researchers hope that creating more accurate maps - especially those that are customized according to local conditions down to the county level - will help coastal municipalities prepare to face the effects of climate change head-on," researchers said in a statement.
The paper has been published in Nature Communications.
