Limitations to the coastal flooding model
This short blog post is to emphasise the inevitable limitations in modelling potentially catastrophic events several decades in the future, with specific relevance to the blog post entitled “Wales Underwater?”.
Climate Central uses the best available data to determine which land areas show a reasonable likelihood of being inundated on an annual basis in 2050. There are numerous limitations to the modelling, but some highly relevant ones for Wales include:
- Existing or future flood defences are not considered within the model. Some relevant examples are:
- The Cardiff Barrage which would doubtless provide considerable resilience to coastal surges for the two rivers which feed the Bay, although coastal water ingress from other areas is still an obvious severe risk to the city
- The sea protection at Borth, although it is easy to imagine coastal waters penetrating at many points along the extended shoreline
- The uncertainty with respect to elevation is around 10cm
However there are inevitable risk factors which could increase the likelihood of flooding more generally. This model considers only coastal flooding; with higher sea levels, combined with more frequent and severe rainfall, coastal and estuarine areas will almost certainly be at greater risk of river flooding as well as coastal flooding, with communities at slightly higher altitudes also potentially experiencing more frequent flood events.