Climate change impact on the compound flood risk in a coastal city

•Developed a hybrid statistical-numerical model which predicts that without intervention the compound flood risk will increase in Haikou City under the influence of future climate change.•Under the influence of climate change, both rainfall and sea water level will increase.•Climate change will increase the probability and the failure probability of compound flood, and will intensify inundation (increase flood depths, extend the flood extent and longer flood durations).•The combined impact of future changes in rainfall and water level on the magnitude of flooding is greater than the sum of their individual impacts. Compound flooding caused by a combination of rainfall and water level may occur in coastal cities. Under the influence of climate change, compound flooding is likely to be intensified. In this paper, using the main urban area of Haikou City as an example, we developed an event-based statistical-numerical hybrid framework to investigate the effects of sea level rise (SLR) and future rainfall changes on compound flood risk. Future rainfall was predicted by using five global climate models (GCMs) in CMIP5. A combination of GCMs and IPCC AR5 was used to predict the future SLR. The copula was then used to calculate the probabilistic risk of compound flooding (OR joint probability and failure probability) for historical and future scenarios, and the numerical model was utilized to evaluate the risk of inundation under historical and future scenarios. The probabilistic risk results show that both the probability and the failure probability of compound flooding will increase in the future. Output from GCMs indicate that when the OR event of the 5-year event (the compound flooding when at least one of the 5-year rainfall and the 5-year water level happens) occurs, the joint probability of future compound flooding will likely increase to 37.5%. The numerical model results indicate that the flood extent, flood depth and flood duration will increase under the influence of future rainfall and SLR. Under the impact of climate change, the flood depth in the FS5 case will increase by 22.85% and the flood extent in the FS5 case will increase by 41.42% compared to HS5. By controlling for variables, we also find that the combined impact of future changes in rainfall and water level on the magnitude of flooding is greater than the sum of their individual impacts. Finally, we find that water storage facilities and tide gates could be set up to mitigate compound floo