Brief communication: The role of using precipitation or river discharge data when assessing global coastal compound flooding

Abstract

Interacting storm surges and high water-runoff can cause compound flooding (CF) in low-lying coasts and river estuaries. The large-scale CF hazard has been typically studied using proxies such as the concurrence of storm surge extremes either with precipitation or with river discharge extremes. Here the impact of the choice of such proxies is addressed employing state-of-the-art global datasets. Although being proxies of diverse physical mechanisms, we find that the two approaches show similar CF spatial patterns. However, deviations increase with the catchment size and our findings indicate that CF in long rivers (catchment & 5-10,000 Km2 ) is more accurately analysed using river discharge data. The precipitation-based assessment allows for considering local rainfall-driven CF, and CF in small rivers not resolved by large-scale datasets.