Abstract
Mitigation of losses due to coastal hazards has become an increasingly urgent and challenging problem in light of rising seas and the continued escalation of coastal population density. Unfortunately, stakeholders responsible for assuring the safety of these coastal communities are not equipped with the engineering research community’s latest tools for high-fidelity risk assessment and geospatial decision support. In the event of a hurricane or nor’easter, such capabilities are exceptionally vital to project storm impacts on critical infrastructure and other municipal assets and to inform preemptive actions that can save lives and mitigate property damage. In response, a web-based visualization environment was developed using the GeoNode content management system, informed by the needs of municipal stakeholders. Within this secure platform, registered users with roles in planning, emergency management and first response can simulate the impact of hurricanes and nor’easters using the platform’s storm Hazard Projection (SHP) Tool. The SHP Tool integrates fast-to-compute windfield models with surrogate models of high-fidelity storm surge and waves to rapidly simulate user-defined storm scenarios, considering the effects of tides, sea level rise, dune breaches and track uncertainty. In the case of a landfalling hurricane, SHP tool outputs are automatically loaded into the user’s dashboard to visualize the projected wind, storm surge and wave run-up based on the latest track information published by the National Hurricane Center. Under either use case, outputs of the SHP Tool are visualized within a robust collaborative geospatial environment supporting the seamless exploration of centralized libraries of geographic information system (GIS) data from federal, state, county and local authorities, with tools to add user-supplied annotations such as notes or other geospatial mark-ups. This paper will overview the development and deployment of this platform in the State of New Jersey, detailing the cyberinfrastructure design and underlying computational models, as well as the user stories that inspired the platform’s functionalities and interfaces. The study concludes with reflections from the process of piloting this project with stakeholders at the state and municipal level to support more risk-responsive and data-informed decision making.
Highlights
Mitigation of losses due to coastal hazards has become an increasingly urgent and challenging problem worldwide
As the needs assessment revealed the importance of simulating losses of coastal protective features, these simulations were conducted the current dune elevations, and for two deteriorated cases: degraded dunes where transect elevations were reduced by 50% and compromised dunes where the elevation of the dune was reduced to grade level to simulate a breach
The platform has supported better risk-informed decision making by giving municipalities access to the state-of-the-art simulation tools for site-specific coastal hazards in a manner that is approachable and reduces computational demands from hours in a cluster to minutes on a personal device. This was accomplished using a fast-tocompute linear analytical model for the boundary-layer winds of a moving hurricane coupled with a surrogate modeling approach for storm surge that leverages existing databases of simulations for synthetic hurricanes and historical nor’easters to provide a highly efficient emulator using a small number of model parameters
Summary
Mitigation of losses due to coastal hazards has become an increasingly urgent and challenging problem worldwide. Stakeholders responsible for assuring the safety of these coastal communities are not equipped with tools that offer the level of fidelity and granularity needed to inform preemptive actions that can save lives and mitigate property damage, both in support of long-term planning and management of coastal development, and for emergency preparedness and response to approaching storms In both use cases, stakeholders require an accurate projection of site-specific wind, wave, and surge hazards, which can be challenging to deliver in an approachable manner to the non-specialists leading these efforts given the sophistication and complexity of these simulations. By engaging the most up-to-date (and publicly available) information on topography, bathymetry and land use/land cover for the State of New Jersey, the SHP Tool estimates the site-specific hazard exposure for any locale in the state under any arbitrary hurricane scenario This capability was extended for the wind fields and storm surge under extratropical storms (nor’easters), in response to the needs assessment in section “System Requirements.”.
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