Climate Change Impacts Absent from FEMA's Redrawn NYC Flood Maps
Scientists argue new FEMA flood maps may be too conservative because they don't consider future sea level rise, with implications for Sandy rebuilding.
By Katherine Bagley, InsideClimate News | Feb 6, 2013
2/6/13: Paragraph 11 of this story has been updated to include more information from FEMA.
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.
But 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. 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.
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.