Increased flood exposure due to climate change and population growth in the United States

However, there remains uncertainty regarding impacts upon flood occurrence and subsequent population exposure. Here, we quantify changes in population exposure to flood hazard across the contiguous United States.

We combine simulations from a climate model large ensemble and a high-resolution hydrodynamic flood model-allowing us to directly assess changes across a wide range of extreme precipitation magnitudes and accumulation timescales. We report a mean increase in the 100-year precipitation event of similar to 20% (magnitude) and >200% (frequency) in a high warming scenario, yielding a similar to 30-127% increase in population exposure.