Delineating Sea Level Rise Inundation Using a Graph Traversal Algorithm

The rate of sea level rise will roughly double over the next century with a conservative projection of 0.18?0.59 m by 2100 (IPCC 2007). Inundation caused by sea level rise will likely disrupt the physical, economic, and social systems in coastal regions worldwide. All existing methods to assess the potential impacts of sea level rise could only delineate the inundation by a specific sea level rise. In addition to providing another inundation method based on the cost distance GIS function, this research developed an innovative method that calculated the minimum sea level rise needed to inundate each cell in a Digital Elevation Model (DEM). Both methods considered water connectivity and performed better than the simple ?bathtub? approach, especially with sea level rises below 1 m. Implementation data structures significantly affected the efficiency of the new method. Several data structures were proposed and compared. Our results indicated the combination of a binary heap and hash table data structure was the most efficient implementation.