Climate Change, Sea Level Rise and Accelerated Flooding Along the U.S. East Coast
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—
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Birkbeck 30 Russell Square
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Climate Change, Sea Level Rise and Accelerated Flooding Along the U.S. East Coast
Tal Ezer, Professor of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA (tezer@odu.edu; http://www.ccpo.odu.edu/Facstaff/faculty/tezer/ezer.html )
(Fall 2014: visiting scientist at the National Oceanography Centre & the University of Southampton)
Thursday 9 October 2014
Birkbeck College, Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies
30 Russell Square, room 101
Recent studies show a 'hotspot of accelerated sea level rise' along the U.S. East Coast. In the region between Cape Hatteras and Cape Cod, sea level is rising much faster than most other places due to contributions from global sea level rise, regional land subsidence and climatic changes in ocean currents. As a result, cities around the mid-Atlantic coast have seen acceleration in flooding that required immediate attention and planning. Old Dominion University is located in Norfolk, Virginia, one of the most affected cities of this 'hotspot', so it recently established the Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Initiative (CCSLRI; http://www.odu.edu//research/initiatives/ccslri/ ) and the Mitigation and Adaptation Research Institute (MARI; http://www.mari.odu.edu/). These institutions will address those issues through interdisciplinary research on the scientific, social and economic aspects of climate change, as well as providing information to stakeholders affected by climate change and sea level rise. The talk will review the basic concepts of sea level rise, will present recent scientific findings in the field and discuss the implications for coastal communities affected by climate change.
Ezer, T. and L. P. Atkinson (2014), Accelerated flooding along the U. S. East Coast: On the impact of sea level rise, tides, storms, the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Oscillations. Earth's Future, doi:10.1002/2014EF000252.
Ezer, T. (2013), Sea level rise, spatially uneven and temporally unsteady: Why the U.S. East Coast, the global tide gauge record and the global altimeter data show different trends, Geophysical Research Letters, 40(20), 5439-5444, doi:10.1002/2013GL057952.
Ezer, T., L. P. Atkinson, W. B. Corlett and J. L. Blanco (2013), Gulf Stream's induced sea level rise and variability along the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast, Journal of Geophysical Research, 118(2), 685-697, doi:10.1002/jgrc.20091.
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