Herring et al., 2021: Explaining Extreme events of 2019 from a climate perspective. Harvard School of Public Health: Coronavirus and climate change While the maps cover local details making use of the best available mapping technology to us, it must not be used to inform specific local policy and mitigation decision without further and more targeted dynamical model simulations. The modelling here presented has not been checked against more realistic ‘dynamic’ scenarios, and so real world impacts could be worse in certain areas and less acute in other areas. The tools are simply an approximate attempt to graphically illustrate an example of sea water levels, and potential associated impacts, during extreme high tides under different arbitrary sea level rise scenarios. We need to explore, therefore, what the potential impacts of various levels of change might be for our region.Īs such, the SLR tools developed or endorsed by GWRC (both 2D and 3D) are not an attempt to predict exactly what is going to happen. While nobody knows how much sea level will rise by the end of the century, the certainty that it will continue to rise means that a responsible action demands that we investigate and act accordingly, based on acceptable risks. While sea level is rising relatively slowly, further rises are certain, as a function of excess CO2 in the atmosphere that has already been committed. Covid19, for example, has already significantly changed our society, further highlighting the importance of maintaining healthy ecosystems for our own survival. They represent impacts that have already been happening over the last two decades all over the planet. Importantly, a paper by the Harvard School of Medicine shows that Covid19 may be linked to the root causes of climate change, including air pollution and biodiversity loss. A recent paper on climate extremes attribution has shown that decreased winds are causing more marine heatwaves, and that there is a seven-fold increase in wild fire risk in continental regions due to climate change (Herring et al., 2021). The reality is that climate change impacts are happening right now, and our society is already changing because of them. Paradoxically however, society is still operating under a false paradigm that climate science talks about future, perhaps distant events of high impact. One of the key results of climate science is that carbon emission reductions and adaptation to unavoidable changes are urgently needed efforts. Inter-disciplinary links, such as between climate, health and ecology, are becoming more obvious to researchers, as our knowledge progresses. Data produced as an outcome of that report can be downloaded from the GWRC Open Data Site.Ĭlimate change is already having large and substantial impacts all over the world. This website follows on from a report produced by NIWA for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) in 2016. Colour overlays on the map show elevations at 20cm intervals above MHWS10. The DEM was then recalculated to match the MHWS10 datum based off tidal values provided in a NIWA report. Areas around Wellington Harbour were updated in 2021 based off updated LIDAR elevation datasets from HCC (2016) and WCC (2020). The survey data was subsequently reprocessed in 2017 by Landcare Research with funding from LINZ.
This was based off a laser airborne (LIDAR) survey commissioned by the WAGGIS consortium in 2013. The basis for this mapping is a detailed digital elevation model (DEM) of the Wellington Region.
Tide level offsets are based on values in a report produced by NIWA for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in 2016. Inundation areas were modelled in 2017 based off a detailed digital elevation model (DEM) of the Wellington Region. Alternative map overlays show modelled storm surge flooding at different sea level rise values, for a 1% AEP (100 year) event. This webpage displays a dynamic map which shows the calculated inundation areas at a range of sea level rise values in the Wellington Region.