Climate Change Impacts of Sea Level Rise on the Saemangeum Sea Dike

The Saemangeum Sea Dike, completed in 2011 in South Korea, is the longest sea dike in the world. One of the most pressing issues of today, climate change leads to sea-level rise that could increase the risk of sea dike overflow. However, what impact climate change will have on the Saemangeum Sea Dike has not been verified yet. Here, we estimate the impacts of sea-level rise on the Saemangeum Sea Dike, using the Linear Regression Analysis method, the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) method, and the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) method. The sea level data of the Saemangeum area over the last 30 years were analyzed, and the results showed that the maximum rate of sea-level rise of the Saemangeum Sea Dike is at 2.51 mm/year when the EEMD method was applied. It means that the impact of sea-level rise on the Saemangeum sea dike is reasonably low because the sea level rise will exceed the freeboard after 366 years, so there is currently no clear sign that it poses a problem.