Storm surges are the most important driver of flooding in many coastal areas. Understanding the spatial extent of storm surge events has important financial and practical implications for flood risk management, reinsurance, infrastructure reliability and emergency response. In this paper, we apply a new tracking algorithm to a high-resolution surge hindcast (CODEC, 1980–2017) to characterize the spatial dependence and temporal evolution of extreme surge events along the coastline of the UK and Ireland. We quantify the severity of each spatial event based on its footprint extremity to select and rank the collection of events. Several surge footprint types are obtained based on the most impacted coastal stretch from each particular event, and these are linked to the driving storm tracks. Using the collection of the extreme surge events, we assess the spatial distribution and interannual variability of the duration, size, severity, and type. We find that the northeast coastline is most impacted by the longest and largest storm surge events, while the English Channel experiences the shortest and smallest storm surge events. The interannual variability indicates that the winter seasons of 1989-90 and 2013–14 were the most serious in terms of the number of events and their severity, based on the return period along the affected coastlines. The most extreme surge event and the highest number of events occurred in the winter season 1989–90, while the proportion of events with larger severities was higher during the winter season 2013–14. This new spatial analysis approach of surge extremes allows us to distinguish several categories of spatial footprints of events around the UK/Ireland coast and link these to distinct storm tracks. The spatial dependence structures detected can improve multivariate statistical methods which are crucial inputs to coastal flooding assessments.

中文翻译：

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追踪英国和爱尔兰海岸线周围极端风暴潮的空间足迹

风暴潮是许多沿海地区洪水的最重要驱动因素。了解风暴潮事件的空间范围对于洪水风险管理、再保险、基础设施可靠性和应急响应具有重要的财务和实际意义。在本文中，我们将一种新的跟踪算法应用于高分辨率海浪后报（CODEC，1980-2017），以描述英国和爱尔兰海岸线极端海浪事件的空间依赖性和时间演变。我们根据每个空间事件的足迹末端来量化每个空间事件的严重性，以选择事件集合并对其进行排名。根据每个特定事件中受影响最严重的沿海地区，获得了几种浪涌足迹类型，这些足迹与驱动风暴路径相关。通过收集极端激增事件，我们评估了持续时间、规模、严重程度和类型的空间分布和年际变化。我们发现东北海岸线受到最长和最大风暴潮事件的影响最大，而英吉利海峡经历了最短和最小的风暴潮事件。年际变化表明，根据受影响海岸线的重现期，就事件数量和严重程度而言，1989-90 年和 2013-14 年冬季是最严重的。最极端的激增事件和最多的事件发生在1989-90年冬季，而严重程度较大的事件比例在2013-14年冬季更高。这种新的极端浪涌空间分析方法使我们能够区分英国/爱尔兰海岸周围事件的几类空间足迹，并将它们与不同的风暴路径联系起来。检测到的空间依赖性结构可以改进多元统计方法，这是沿海洪水评估的关键输入。