Every once in while an educated Buyer will ask me about storm surge and where they can find information on the risk to a particular property.
First, what is storm surge? Storm surge is the wind from a hurricane blowing the water up against, into and over the land. Just like a child blowing water across a plate but with much larger amounts of both water and wind. The cool part about this is that in the last hurricane there were places in the Keys and the Bahamas that had the reverse. The water went away from the shore so it looked like an enormous low tide. Makes sense as all that water needs to come from someplace right?
Where can I find information on if a property is affected by storm surge?
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/nationalsurge/
READ THIS POST to see how the forecast storm surge can be applied to see if your house will be inundated with water.
READ THIS POST for a continuation of this discussion on Jupiter property.
As we have discussed before the FEMA FIRM Maps are developed for surface flooding (think rain) and are now based upon the NAVD 1988. Storm surge maps like this one linked to above are based upon storm surge from a hurricane and are based upon the SLOSH models. What is SLOSH? SLOSH stands for Sea, Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes. So think about wind blowing water across a lake or the sea, or wide intracoastal in Florida, or overland such as waves going right over a barrier island.
