Analysis of the risk associated with coastal flooding hazards: a new historical extreme storm surges dataset for Dunkirk, France

摘要

This paper aims to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a historical study devoted to French nuclear power plants (NPPs) which can be prone to extreme coastal flooding events. It has been shown in the literature that the use of historical information (HI) can significantly improve the probabilistic and statistical modeling of extreme events. There is a significant lack of historical data on coastal flooding (storms and storm surges) compared to river flooding events. To address this data scarcity and to improve the estimation of the risk associated with coastal flooding hazards, a dataset of historical storms and storm surges that hit the Nord-Pasde-Calais region during the past five centuries was created from archival sources, examined and used in a frequency analysis (FA) in order to assess its impact on frequency estimations. This work on the Dunkirk site (representative of the Gravelines NPP) is a continuation of previous work performed on the La Rochelle site in France. Indeed, the frequency model (FM) used in the present paper had some success in the field of coastal hazards and it has been applied in previous studies to surge datasets to prevent coastal flooding in the La Rochelle region in France.