Coastal extreme sea levels in the Caribbean Sea induced by tropical cyclones

Every year the Caribbean Sea faces the passage of powerful 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 over 1000 tropical cyclones over the Caribbean Sea that are representative of the present-day climate and that have been extracted from a global database of synthetic hurricanes spanning a 10,000-year period. The atmospheric forcing fields, built from the synthetic tropical cyclones, are used to feed a fully coupled hydrodynamic-wave model with high resolution (~1 km) along the continental and island coasts. Given the large number of events modelled, the outputs 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 large wind-waves.