Abstract
Tidal measurements from the Italian city of Venice, available since 1872 and constituting the longest sea-level record in the Mediterranean area, indicate that local flooding statistics have dramatically worsened during the last decades. Individual flooding episodes are associated with adverse meteorological conditions, and their increased frequency is mainly attributed to the rise of the average local Relative Sea Level (RSL). However, the role of interannual-to-multidecadal modes of average RSL variability in shaping the evolution of Venice flooding is highly significant and can cause sharp increases in the flood frequency episodes. Here, we use local tidal measurements in Venice covering 1872–2020 to deeply inspect the contribution and predictability of the different components characterizing the observed average RSL variability, including a long-term trend and four quasi-periodic modes. Our results demonstrate that the observed increase in flooding frequency is not only due to the average RSL rise but also due to a progressive widening of tidal anomalies around the average RSL, revealed by opposite trends in mean tidal maxima and minima. Moreover, interannual and decadal periodicities are not negligible in modulating the timing of annual mean RSL and flood frequency extremes. This study demonstrates that the last decades experienced an unprecedented sharp increase in sea level, which significantly affected the decadal predictability of RSL with statistical methods. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the sources of uncertainty in decadal sea-level variability and predictability in the Venice lagoon.
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Data availability
All data used in this study are either available from public resources or can be obtained through a personal request to the corresponding author. Concerning the original tide gauge series, data since 1983 are freely available online on the CPSM website (https://www.comune.venezia.it/it/content/archivio-storico-livello-marea-venezia-1).
Code availability
SSA was performed with the SSA-MTM toolkit available at the url: http://research.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd//ssa/ (Vautard et al. 1992; Ghil et al. 2002). The other analyses were performed with MATLAB codes developed by the authors. Figure 1 was obtained with the m_map package (Pawlowicz 2020) for MATLAB software, using GSHHG dataset for coastlines (Wessel and Smith 1996) and ETOPO1 dataset for bathymetry (Amante and Eakins 2009).
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Acknowledgements
Scientific activity was performed within the Research Programme Venezia2021, with the contribution of the Provveditorato for the Public Works of Veneto, Trentino Alto Adige and Friuli Venezia Giulia, provided through the concessionary of State Consorzio Venezia Nuova and coordinated by CORILA. The authors thank Dr. Silvia M. Alessio for her precious assistance, especially in developing the NN algorithms, and Carola Cattaneo, who collaborated on this study during her master thesis. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript, which helped to improve the paper.
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SR, CT, and DZ conceived the study. SR performed the analyses and drafted the manuscript. All authors contributed to the discussion and finalization of the paper.
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Rubinetti, S., Taricco, C., Zanchettin, D. et al. Interannual-to-multidecadal sea-level changes in the Venice lagoon and their impact on flood frequency. Climatic Change 174, 26 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03448-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03448-2