Projected incremental changes to extreme wind-driven wave heights for the twenty-first century

Global climate change will alter wind sea and swell waves, modifying the severity, frequency and impact of episodic coastal flooding and morphological change. Global-scale estimates of increases to coastal impacts have been typically attributed to sea level rise and not specifically to changes to waves on their own. This study provides a reduced complexity method for applying projected extreme wave changes to local scale impact studies. We use non-stationary extreme value analysis to distil an incremental change signal in extreme wave heights and associate this with a change in the frequency of events globally. Extreme wave heights are not projected to increase everywhere. We find that the largest increases will typically be experienced at higher latitudes, and that there is high ensemble model agreement on an increase (doubling of events) for the waters south of Australia, the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Guinea by the end of the twenty-first century.

Automated summary

Global climate change will alter wind sea and swell waves, changing the severity, frequency and impact of episodic coastal flooding. The study suggests that extreme wave heights are not projected to increase everywhere, with the largest increases typically experienced at higher latitudes. There is high ensemble model agreement on an increase in events for specific regions by the end of the twenty-first century.