CAREER: Monitoring Chronic Impacts of Nuisance Floods to Enable Incremental Adaptation Against Sea Level Rise

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project explores the potential for the chronic signal of nuisance floods to be used to raise community awareness about sea-level rise impacts and motivate more appropriate levels of investment in adaptation against extreme and non-extreme coastal floods. Sea levels are rising at an unprecedented rate, reducing the gap between high tides and flooding thresholds thereby increasing the frequency of nuisance floods (aka high-tide flooding). There is a limited knowledge about the extent of anticipated incidents and cumulative impacts of these floods as well as the potential effectiveness of alternative measures in flood risk mitigation. This project aims to develop a resilience assessment framework that tracks accumulated costs of nuisance floods to serve as an ongoing indicator of sea-level rise and support regional and individual decision making related to investments to reduce sea-level rise related losses. The project will also include development and deployment of a game-based learning platform that conveys information about cumulative losses and allows users to explore potential alternative solutions. The game will be used to engage students from K-12 through college, as well as informal learners, in lessons about sea-level rise, the risks it presents, and options for reducing those risks. In this project the capacity of coastal infrastructure for risk aversion will be tested using hybrid hydrologic-hydrodynamic and statistical models, taking non-stationarity, multi-dimensionality, nonlinearity and chronicity of sea-level rise impacts into account. The resulting modeling platform will advance knowledge on cumulative hazards with chronic nature of impacts and determine the underlying processes that yield degradation of infrastructure serviceability over time. Research outputs will help communities assess the role of recurrent flooding in strengthening nonfinancial forms of capital and possibly support incremental adaptation in disadvantaged communities. The research outputs will help these communities make informed decisions on how to improve their resiliency through incremental adaptation. The results will be used to design a novel game-based learning platform to assess the effectiveness of risk management approaches based on the signals from nuisance floods. This project is funded jointly by the Humans, Disasters and the Built Environment Program (HDBE), The Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and the Engineering Directorate's Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.