Coastal Nature Based Solutions to Mitigate Flood Impacts and Enhance Resilience

Coastal wetlands are natural features that provide valuable ecosystem services besides their functionality as buffers against coastal flooding. The sustainability of these systems depends on climatic, hydrologic, and oceanic conditions. Recent ecological-hydrodynamic coupled modeling development improved our understanding of the dynamic response of coastal wetlands to chronic processes, i.e. sea level rise (SLR). However, there remains a need for appropriate tools/platforms that: i) quantify the performance of wetland restoration projects as forms of NBS through integrated field, remote sensing, and modeling-based studies, and ii) translate the outputs of such dynamic modeling practices to actionable data and policy guidelines for decision makers and planners. In collaboration with CIROH, National Ocean Service aims to leverage and build upon integrated hydrologic and hydrodynamic modeling advancements, like those being led by National Weather Services, to provide science that improves community adaptation and mitigation with NBS. This includes the ability to plan for, absorb, recover from, or more successfully adapt to actual/potential flooding events through preventative actions that include NBS and consider sea level rise.

In this project, we propose to develop a detailed hydrodynamics model of Mobile bay, Alabama. The model will be parametrized and calibrated with the help of state-of-the-art machine-learning and data fusion techniques that translate remotely-sensed data into spatially distributed inputs to ensure dynamics of compound flooding are well represented. This model will be further validated against in-situ observation and data collected at the field. The validated model will then be used to analyze the “what if” scenarios proposed based on objectives of the project. The proposed scenarios will be in collaboration with NOAA partners and will cover wide range of spatial scales (i.e., project-scales vs regional-scales) and across a range of climate, hydrological, and socioeconomic scenarios. We will actively engage key stakeholders, i.e. coastal zone management programs, natural resource agencies, NERRs, and non-profit organizations to ensure the proposed scenarios are co-produced and will meet their planning criteria. We will conduct meetings with key stakeholders at the selected NERRs to assess needs by engaging participants in various exercises (e.g., discussion, mapping, visualization). Based on their feedback, we will refine our tools throughout the project duration. Through these stakeholder engagement practices we will assess the effectiveness of our products in facilitating the process of evaluations of proposed NBS, and will seek opportunities to provide practical guidelines for successful implementation of NBS.