Large discrepancies between event- and response-based compound flood hazard estimates

Santamaria-Aguilar, Sara; Maduwantha, Pravin; Enriquez, Alejandra R.; Wahl, Thomas

doi:10.5194/nhess-26-571-2026

Articles | Volume 26, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-571-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Methodological innovations for the analysis and management...

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-571-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 26, issue 1

Research article

|

27 Jan 2026

Research article |

| 27 Jan 2026

Large discrepancies between event- and response-based compound flood hazard estimates

Sara Santamaria-Aguilar, Pravin Maduwantha, Alejandra R. Enriquez, and Thomas Wahl

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-26-571-2026-supplement

Data sets

Compound flood simulations for 5000 Compound events for Gloucester City (NJ) Part 1 Sara Santamaria-Aguilar https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15047845

Compound flood simulations for 5000 Compound events for Gloucester City (NJ) Part 2 Sara Santamaria-Aguilar https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15065555

11 Digit Hydrologic Unit Code delineations for New Jersey New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Bureau of Geographic Information Systems https://gisdata-njdep.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/02599a9424254a4ea33e689941559e3c_17

Coastal National Elevation Database (CoNED) topobathymetric elevation data U.S. Geological Survey, Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/coastal-national-elevation-database-applications-project/data

Model code and software

Synthetic compound storm event generation using copula-based non-tidal residual–rainfall modeling (Version v1) P. Maduwantha https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18216090

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Short summary

Traditional flood assessments use an event-based approach, assuming flood risk matches the chance of flood drivers. However, flooding also depends on topography and the spatio-temporal features of events. The response-based approach uses many events to estimate flood hazard directly. In Gloucester City (NJ, U.S.), we find that frequent events can cause rare (1 %) flood levels due to their spatio-temporal characteristics. Including these factors is key for accurate flood hazard estimates.