Presenter: William Sweet (NOAA)

Description:
The United States Interagency Task Force on Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flood Hazard Scenarios and Tools is tasked with providing authoritative, consistent and freely-accessible information for U.S. coastlines to serve as a starting point for on-the-ground coastal preparedness planning and risk management activities.  This talk will present the Task Force’s contribution to the 5th U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA5), which builds upon its 4^th NCA contribution (NOAA, 2017) using methods and findings of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Key updates include 1) temporal and spatial refinements to the Task Forces’ scenarios and their regional projections, 2) the development of a tide-gauge based set of gridded extreme water level probabilities applicable for most U.S. coastlines and 3) using NOAA and NASA coastal sea level observations to identify scenario projections that align in 2050 with current trends and 4) assessing flood-frequency changes by 2050 considering no mitigative changes reflected in NOAA’s contemporary coastal flood depth-severity thresholds.  Finally, we will discuss planned updates to agency tools to facilitate uptake of these data and products to support planning and decision making.