Comparing patterns of hurricane washover into built and unbuilt environments
Comparing patterns of hurricane washover into built and unbuilt environments
Extreme geohazard events can change landscape morphology by redistributing huge volumes of sediment. Event-driven sediment deposition is typically studied in unbuilt settings – despite the ubiquity of occurrence and high economic cost of these geohazard impacts in built environments. Moreover, sedimentary consequences of extreme events in built settings tend to go unrecorded because they are rapidly cleared, at significant expense, from streets and roads to facilitate emergency response. Reducing disaster costs requires an ability to predict disaster impacts, which itself requires comprehensive measurement and study of the physical consequences of geohazard events. Here, using a database of poststorm aerial imagery, we measure plan-view geometric characteristics of sandy washover deposits in built and unbuilt settings following five different hurricane strikes along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the US since 2011. We identify systematic similarities and differences between washover morphology in built and unbuilt environments, which we further explore with a simplified numerical model. Our findings suggest that spatial characteristics of the built environment (termed “fabric”) – specifically, the built fraction of the depositional zone – exerts a fundamental control on the form of large deposits. Accounting for the influence of built fabric on the morphodynamics of flow-driven geohazards is a tractable step toward improved forecasts of hazard impacts and disaster risk reduction.
distortion, hurricane, morphometry, overwash, tropical cyclones, washover
Lazarus, Eli
642a3cdb-0d25-48b1-8ab8-8d1d72daca6e
Goldstein, Evan B.
25029a23-b5b1-4e08-9273-a62343cc8ec3
Taylor, Luke, Alexander
d7c429f9-d964-4f6f-bb61-45c9b680f375
Williams, Hannah
879e08ff-fc7e-4699-a27a-06be53e52732
4 February 2021
Lazarus, Eli
642a3cdb-0d25-48b1-8ab8-8d1d72daca6e
Goldstein, Evan B.
25029a23-b5b1-4e08-9273-a62343cc8ec3
Taylor, Luke, Alexander
d7c429f9-d964-4f6f-bb61-45c9b680f375
Williams, Hannah
879e08ff-fc7e-4699-a27a-06be53e52732
Lazarus, Eli, Goldstein, Evan B., Taylor, Luke, Alexander and Williams, Hannah
(2021)
Comparing patterns of hurricane washover into built and unbuilt environments.
Earth's Future, 9 (3), [e2020EF001818].
(doi:10.1029/2020EF001818).
Abstract
Extreme geohazard events can change landscape morphology by redistributing huge volumes of sediment. Event-driven sediment deposition is typically studied in unbuilt settings – despite the ubiquity of occurrence and high economic cost of these geohazard impacts in built environments. Moreover, sedimentary consequences of extreme events in built settings tend to go unrecorded because they are rapidly cleared, at significant expense, from streets and roads to facilitate emergency response. Reducing disaster costs requires an ability to predict disaster impacts, which itself requires comprehensive measurement and study of the physical consequences of geohazard events. Here, using a database of poststorm aerial imagery, we measure plan-view geometric characteristics of sandy washover deposits in built and unbuilt settings following five different hurricane strikes along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the US since 2011. We identify systematic similarities and differences between washover morphology in built and unbuilt environments, which we further explore with a simplified numerical model. Our findings suggest that spatial characteristics of the built environment (termed “fabric”) – specifically, the built fraction of the depositional zone – exerts a fundamental control on the form of large deposits. Accounting for the influence of built fabric on the morphodynamics of flow-driven geohazards is a tractable step toward improved forecasts of hazard impacts and disaster risk reduction.
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2020EF001818
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Published date: 4 February 2021
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Funding Information:
The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the manuscript, and for feedback on the preprint from the WHOI Mudrakers reading group. They gratefully acknowledge support from The Leverhulme Trust (RPG‐2018‐282, to EDL and EBG), DoD/DARPA (R0011836623/HR001118200064, to EBG), and an Early Career Research Fellowship from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (to EBG). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. EarthArXiv
Funding Information:
The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the manuscript, and for feedback on the EarthArXiv preprint from the WHOI Mudrakers reading group. They gratefully acknowledge support from The Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2018-282, to EDL and EBG), DoD/DARPA (R0011836623/HR001118200064, to EBG), and an Early Career Research Fellowship from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (to EBG). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021. The Authors.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Keywords:
distortion, hurricane, morphometry, overwash, tropical cyclones, washover
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 452079
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/452079
ISSN: 2328-4277
PURE UUID: 48a1ca81-4fb9-48d6-b942-3a2f09fce37b
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Date deposited: 11 Nov 2021 17:31
Last modified: 06 Jun 2024 01:58
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Author:
Evan B. Goldstein
Author:
Luke, Alexander Taylor
Author:
Hannah Williams
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