Atmospheric rivers (ARs) effect inland hydrological impacts related to extreme precipitation. However, little is known about the possible coastal hazards associated with these events. Here we elucidate high-tide floods (HTFs) and storm surges during ARs on the US West Coast during 1980—2016. HTFs and landfalling ARs co-occur more often than expected from random chance. Between 10%—63% of HTFs coincide with landfalling ARs, depending on location. However, only 2%—15% of ARs coincide with HTFs, suggesting that ARs typically must co-occur with anomalously high tides or mean sea levels to cause HTFs. Storm surges during ARs are interpretable in terms of local wind, pressure, and precipitation forcing: meridional wind and barometric pressure are the primary drivers of storm surge, but precipitation can also make secondary contributions. This study highlights the relevance of ARs to coastal impacts, clarifies the drivers of storm surge during ARs, and identifies future research directions.

In many places around the world, tide gauges have been measuring substantial non-astronomical changes. Here we document an exceptional large spatial scale case of changes in tidal range in the North Sea, featuring pronounced trends between -2.3 mm/yr in the UK and up to 7 mm/yr in the German Bight between 1958 and 2014. These changes are spatially heterogeneous, suggesting a superposition of local and large-scale processes at work within the basin. We use principal component analysis to separate large-scale signals appearing coherently over multiple stations from rather localized changes. We identify two leading principal components (PCs) that explain about 69% of tidal range changes in the entire North Sea including the divergent trend pattern along UK and German coastlines, which suggest movement of the region’s semidiurnal amphidromic areas. By applying numerical and statistical analyses, we can assign a baroclinic (PC1) and a barotropic large-scale signal (PC2), explaining a large part of the overall variance. A comparison between PC2 and tide gauge records along the European Atlantic coast, Iceland and Canada shows significant correlations on time scales of less than 2 years, which suggests an external and basin-wide forcing mechanism. By contrast, PC1 dominates in the southern North Sea and originates, at least in part, from stratification changes in nearby shallow waters. In particular, from an analysis of observed density profiles, we suggest that an increased strength and duration of the summer pycnocline has stabilized the water column against turbulent dissipation and allowed for higher tidal elevations at the coast.