“Old statistics on flood risk are obsolete,” said Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). If the New York maps are too conservative, property owners might be wasting their money by rebuilding in especially vulnerable areas or by adapting structures to meet standards that will have to be revised in a few years. The flood maps, which are produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), are used to set insurance requirements and building codes. The omissions mean the maps already may be outdated-or will be very soon-some scientists said, with implications for Hurricane Sandy rebuilding efforts, as well as the city’s plans for adapting to long-term climate change. … The New York City area isn’t ready for the storm surges of today, as we learned from Sandy, let alone what is possible in the future.” “The fear is that we’ll get a meter of rise by the end of the century, potentially more,” Orton said. If future sea level rise had been taken into account, the flood zone would likely have been much larger, said Philip Orton, a physical oceanographer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, who served as a technical reviewer on the updated maps. Many structures destroyed by the superstorm are not included in the newly drawn flood zones. The maps also don’t incorporate data from Hurricane Sandy, which caused catastrophic flooding in the nation’s financial capital. Scientists say that by the 2080s, sea levels off the city’s coast could rise by as much as five feet from melting glaciers, making storm surges more severe and causing floods much further inland than the new maps indicate. When the federal government released updated flood maps for the New York City region last week, residents were shocked to find that the number of houses and businesses in the region’s flood zone had doubled since the maps were last revised, in 1986.īut it now appears that those maps might have underestimated the extent of New York’s flood risk, because they don’t factor in the effects of future climate change. 2/6/13: Paragraph 11 of this story has been updated to include more information from FEMA.
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