Premium
Storm Tide Recurrence Intervals – A Statistical Approach Using Beach Ridge Plains in Northern A ustralia
Author(s) -
NOTT JONATHAN
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
geographical research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.695
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1745-5871
pISSN - 1745-5863
DOI - 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2012.00778.x
Subject(s) - storm , ridge , tropical cyclone , return period , geography , climatology , cyclone (programming language) , meteorology , oceanography , physical geography , environmental science , geology , cartography , archaeology , flood myth , engineering , field programmable gate array , embedded system
The marine inundation generated by T ropical C yclone Y asi, north Q ueensland, F ebruary 2011, flooded at least 130 beachfront homes and many commercial businesses, becoming the most substantial marine inundation impact in A ustralia's modern history. As a consequence, guidelines for building in storm tide impact areas have been developed and discussions are beginning on whether A ustralia needs a national standard for buildings impacted by these events. Central to this will be determining which areas of coastal land need to be subjected to the standard, and this will likely be based upon the magnitude of a particular return interval event. The veracity of the current method for determining these return intervals is difficult to determine as there has been no objective way to assess the accuracy of this approach. One such method is developed here – applying extreme value theory statistics to millennial scale sedimentary records of tropical cyclone marine inundations. The approach is applied to a 5000‐year‐long beach ridge record of tropical cyclone inundations near T ully H eads and the results suggest that the inundation generated by T ropical C yclone Y asi here had a return interval of approximately 1000 years. This is a substantially lower figure than the approximately 5000‐year return interval suggested by the currently accepted approach. Irrespective of which method is more accurate, the marine inundation generated by Y asi was a very rare event and one that may become more common under a future altered climate.