Risk Prediction of Coastal Hazards Induced by Typhoon: A Case Study in the Coastal Region of Shenzhen, China

Abstract

This study presents a risk prediction of coastal hazards induced by typhoons, which are a severe natural hazard that often occur in coastal regions. Taking the coastal hazards happened in Shenzhen as a case study, where is a southeast coastal city of China, we described a methodology to predict the typhoon wind-surge-wave hazard. A typhoon empirical tracking model was adopted to construct full-track typhoon events for 1000 years, based on the statistical characteristics of observed typhoons from satellite imageries. For each individual typhoon, a wind-field model is applied to compute the wind speeds, while the Simulating Waves Nearshore and Advanced Circulation (SWAN+ADCIRC) coupled model is applied to simulate the significant wave heights (SWHs) and storm surge heights. By frequency distribution histogram, it is noted that there exhibits a heavy tail in the probability distribution of maximum surge heights and a thin tail of the peak wind speeds and SWHs in the coastal area of Shenzhen, China. Using the Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD) model, the extreme values of typhoon wind-surge-wave associated with various return periods can be predicted. Taking account into the combined effects of the wind, surge and wave, the joint hazard maps of typhoon wind-surge-wave can be produced for the study area. The methodology of this case study can provide a new reference for risk prediction of coastal hazards induced by typhoon in similar coastal regions like Shenzhen, China.