A new climate change study shows that rising sea levels will cause damaging “urban flooding” more frequently than ever before.

Climate experts have published findings predicting that most U.S. East Coast cities will face 30 or more days of flooding each year by 2050. Researchers Joseph Park and William Sweet with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) produced a frequency-based model that translates changes in sea levels into likely flooding patterns.

The study, released this month in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future, focuses on so-called “nuisance flooding.” While such flooding is not life-threatening, reaching only about one to two feet above local high tide, it can result in serious inconvenience, as well as causing property damage and impacting traffic. According to a set of benchmarks referred to in the study as “tipping points,” such flooding is expected to hit major East Coast cities 30 days or more per year by 2050, and might even be a “near-daily” occurrence by 2100. Low-lying areas would effectively be inundated year-round.

As “communities across the country become increasingly vulnerable to water inundation and flooding, effective risk management is going to become more heavily reliant on environmental data and analysis,” said Holly Bamford, the NOAA’s acting assistant secretary for conservation and management.

NOAA scientists point out that flooding associated with sea levels is not limited to extreme weather conditions. “Coastal communities are beginning to experience sunny-day nuisance or urban flooding,” said study author William Sweet, “much more so than in decades past.” Paying attention to weather reports will not be enough to predict “sunny-day” flood conditions. As a result, regular monitoring of sea levels, and other climate change data, will be an increasingly important part of urban life.

Also significant are the steps cities will have to take in order to deal with these intensifying problems. The NOAA has laid out a series of such “mitigation decisions,” which are likely to include public spending on sea walls and storm water systems, but in more extreme cases could even involve communities “retreating further inland” to fortified territory away from the changing coastlines. Also in the policy handbook are ideas regarding so-called “green infrastructure,” where existing or artificially-created environmental factors are manipulated to make the best of changing climate conditions. Dunes and vegetation-rich wetlands, for instance, can be used to tackle some flooding concerns.

Even with these strategies, the ever-more-common phenomenon of urban flooding will prove a challenge for America’s major coastal cities.