Long-Term Simulations using Coupled Models to Characterize Pluvial, Fluvial, and Coastal Flooding in the Delaware River Basin in a Changing Climate
The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Integrated Coastal Modeling Project (ICoM) is developing modeling capabilities to capture key human-natural system dynamics to be able to simulate time-evolving risks within coastal regions. This includes the development of model couplings for hydrologic (DHSVM) and hydrodynamic (FVCOM and RIFT) models to capture key flooding processes. Using the high-resolution, coupled modeling framework DHSVM-FVCOM-RIFT, we are conducting long-term (multi-decade) simulations of floods in the Delaware River Basin with detailed focus within Philadelphia that account for the interacting processes among pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flooding during compound flooding events. Long-term flood simulations for historical and future climates are being forced by a WRF-simulated thermodynamic global warming dataset with a 12-km resolution that was developed collaboratively by DOE’s IM3 and HyperFACETS projects. Of principal interest of this work is to better understand the long-term distribution, trend, variability, and seasonality of pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flooding (in combination or separately) within the region and how projected changing climate could influence the future flooding potential and its spatial patterns with the high-resolution model configuration. These long-term datasets not only provide key insights to natural system processes, but are key inputs to characterize time-evolving risk to human systems.