Enhancing Coastal Transportation Infrastructure Resilience to Compound Flood Impacts
Research Team Members
Objective:
To develop a high-resolution, stakeholder-informed resilience assessment framework for evaluating the vulnerability and serviceability of coastal transportation infrastructure in Mobile Bay under hurricane-induced compound flooding conditions.
Approach:
This project applies a stakeholder-informed, high-resolution modeling framework to evaluate the vulnerability and serviceability of transportation infrastructure under compound flooding (CF) conditions in Mobile Bay, Alabama. The approach integrates hydrologic-hydrodynamic simulations, transportation network modeling, structured decision-making, and probabilistic fragility modeling to inform resilience strategies. Beginning with stakeholder engagement, we identify critical routes and infrastructure concerns, integrating these with geospatial data and climate projections to develop a coupled CF model that simulates interactions between riverine, pluvial, and coastal flooding. Using tools such as SWMM and coastal hydrodynamics models, we simulate both historical and future flood scenarios to assess functional risk. Fragility functions are then developed for roadway segments, incorporating elevation, traffic volume, and centrality to estimate the probability of service disruption. Transportation network functionality is evaluated through spatial and graph-theory-based analyses, providing insight into access risks, detours, and expected delays. Outputs include CF risk maps, vulnerability scores, and mitigation evaluations, all of which are translated into actionable planning tools that enable emergency managers and infrastructure planners to enhance response capabilities and long-term resilience in a changing climate.
Impact:
This project empowers coastal decision-makers with actionable tools to assess, prioritize, and adapt transportation systems for compound flood resilience—ensuring safer, faster disaster response and long-term infrastructure planning under a changing climate.Abstract:
A stakeholder-informed, high-resolution vulnerability assessment framework focused on compound flood (CF) resilience of coastal transportation systems in Mobile Bay. Transportation infrastructure in coastal communities is increasingly vulnerable to compound flooding caused by concurrent riverine, rainfall, and coastal surge processes—yet integrated, operational CF risk models and fragility assessments tailored for transportation planning remain absent.
Today:
- Coastal transportation systems are assessed using separate models for rainfall, river, and surge impacts.
- Few tools exist to quantify serviceability or accessibility loss during compound flood scenarios.
- Limited integration of stakeholder priorities and real-time planning data in resilience modeling.
This Project Will:
- Integrate multi-source data and compound flood drivers into a unified modeling framework.
- Generate fragility curves and risk metrics tailored to Mobile Bay’s roadways.
- Engage stakeholders to co-design mitigation strategies and inform infrastructure priorities.
- Produce spatially explicit, high-fidelity CF impact maps for emergency management and planning.
Project impacts include:
- Enables rapid, science-informed decisions for protecting road access to critical infrastructure.
- Reduces uncertainty in disaster planning by modeling service disruption probabilities under compound flood conditions.
- Offers a scalable framework that can be applied to other coastal regions facing similar flood-related infrastructure challenges.