Current and future rainfall-driven flood risk from hurricanes  in Puerto Rico under 1.5 and 2&thinsp;°C climate change

Archer, Leanne; Neal, Jeffrey; Bates, Paul; Vosper, Emily; Carroll, Dereka; Sosa, Jeison; Mitchell, Daniel

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-375-2024

Articles | Volume 24, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-375-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-375-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 2

Research article

|

05 Feb 2024

Research article |

| 05 Feb 2024

Current and future rainfall-driven flood risk from hurricanes in Puerto Rico under 1.5 and 2 °C climate change

Leanne Archer, Jeffrey Neal, Paul Bates, Emily Vosper, Dereka Carroll, Jeison Sosa, and Daniel Mitchell

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-375-2024-supplement

Data sets

Puerto Rico Probability of Flood Inundation Maps Leanne Archer et al. https://doi.org/10.5523/bris.2qtinf5lw52u52snyl5ruwekef

NCEP/EMC 4KM 95~Gridded Data (GRIB) Stage IV Data, version 1.0 J. Du https://doi.org/10.5065/D6PG1QDD

IMERG: Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM NASA https://gpm.nasa.gov/data/imerg

Model code and software

LISFLOOD-FP 8.0 hydrodynamic model (8.0) LISFLOOD-FP Developers https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4073011

Download

Article (6399 KB)
Full-text XML

Short summary

We model hurricane-rainfall-driven flooding to assess how the number of people exposed to flooding changes in Puerto Rico under the 1.5 and 2 °C Paris Agreement goals. Our analysis suggests 8 %–10 % of the population is currently exposed to flooding on average every 5 years, increasing by 2 %–15 % and 1 %–20 % at 1.5 and 2 °C. This has implications for adaptation to more extreme flooding in Puerto Rico and demonstrates that 1.5 °C climate change carries a significant increase in risk.