Coastal extreme sea levels in the Caribbean Sea induced by tropical cyclones
Abstract. Every year the Caribbean Sea faces the passage of several tropical cyclones that generate coastal extreme sea levels with potential strong and hazardous impacts. In this work we simulate the storm surges and wind-waves induced by a set of 1000 tropical cyclones over the Caribbean Sea that are representative of the present-day climate. These events have been extracted from a global database of synthetic hurricanes spanning a 10,000-year period. The atmospheric forcing fields, associated to the set of tropical cyclones, are used to feed a coupled hydrodynamic-wave model with high resolution (~2 km) along the continental and islands coasts. Given the large number of events modeled, our results allow detailed statistical analyses of the magnitude and mechanisms of coastal extreme sea levels as well as the identification of most exposed areas to both storm surges and extreme wind-waves.