Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Bachman

As Hurricane Florence pelts the southeast coast, forecasters are warning residents of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia of life-threatening flooding from storm surge and heavy rainfall.

Storm surge occurs when strong winds from an approaching hurricane push the ocean — which is these days higher because of sea level rise — into the shore. Florence could bring a storm surge as high as 13 feet to some parts of North Carolina. But a much larger area outside the coastal flooding zone will be affected by heavy rain and is at risk of inland flooding.

Earlier this year, in a paper in Environmental Research Letters, we learned that that Americans are at far greater risk from this kind of river and surface flooding than official estimates reveal — as in, three times the risk.

“Florence’s heavy rains will cause ponding and flooding in places that neither the FEMA coastal flooding maps or the FEMA river flooding maps are going to do a good job of predicting,” said Joe Fargione, science director at the Nature Conservancy, […]