Environ. Res. Lett. 10 (2015) 064011
doi:10.1088/1748-9326/10/6/064011
LETTER
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Climate change effects on the worst-case storm surge: a case study
of Typhoon Haiyan
RECEIVED
13 November 2014
REVISED
2 May 2015
ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
27 May 2015
PUBLISHED
11 June 2015
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Izuru Takayabu1, Kenshi Hibino2, Hidetaka Sasaki1, Hideo Shiogama3, Nobuhito Mori4,
Yoko Shibutani5 and Tetsuya Takemi4
1
2
3
4
5
Meteorological Research Institute, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0052, Japan
University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8577, Japan
National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan
Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Uji, Kyoto 611-0011, Japan
Tottori University, Tottori 680-8550, Japan
E-mail: takayabu@mri-jma.go.jp
Keywords: typhoon, haiyan, storm surge, worst case scenario, climate change
Supplementary material for this article is available online
Abstract
Effects of climate change on the worst case scenario of a storm surge induced by a super typhoon in the
present climate are investigated through the case study of Typhoon Haiyan. We present the results of
our investigation on super-typhoon Haiyan by using a super high resolution (1 km grid) regional
model that explicitly handles cloud microphysical processes. As the parent model, we adopted the
operational weekly ensemble experiments (60 km grid) of the Japan Meteorological Agency, and
compared experiments using sea surface temperatures and atmospheric environmental parameters
from before the beginning of anthropogenic climate change (150 years ago) with those using observed
values throughout the typhoon. We were able not only to represent the typhoon’s intensity but also to
evaluate the influences of climate change on worst case storm surges in the Gulf of Leyte due to a
typhoon with high robustness. In 15 of 16 ensemble experiments, the intensity of the simulated worst
case storm in the actual conditions was stronger than that in a hypothetical natural condition without
historical anthropogenic forcing during the past 150 years. The intensity of the typhoon is translated
to a disaster metric by simulating the storm surge height by using a shallow-water long-wave model.
The result indicates that the worst case scenario of a storm surge in the Gulf of Leyte may be worse by
20%, though changes in frequency of such events are not accounted for here.
1. Introduction
Human activities have changed the global climate and
have affected some extreme weather events (Bindoff
et al 2013). A typhoon (i.e., a tropical cyclone or TC) is
one of the most potentially destructive extreme
weather events. Estimation of the power dissipation
index (cube of the maximum surface wind speed
integrated for the whole lifetime of the event), a
measure of the potential destructiveness of a TC over
its lifetime, has already shown that TCs have become
stronger in the past thirty years (Emanuel 2005).
Moreover, the increase in this index is highly correlated with the observed increasing trend in sea surface
temperature (SST) during the same period. However,
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studies disagree about whether changes in TC activity
can be attributed to human influence, owing to
insufficient observations and physical understanding
(Bindoff et al 2013).
There is increasing interest in whether not only
long-term trends of extreme events but also the characteristics of specific recently observed extreme events
can be attributed to external drivers and natural climate variability. Simulations to estimate how predicted sea level increases up to 2050 or 2100 will
change the probability of future inundations in the
eastern coast of the United States on the scale of that
caused by Hurricane Sandy (Sweet et al 2013) have
indicated that the return period of a similar inundation is likely to decrease.