NOAA Study Validates Sea Level Data for Future Flood Risk Outlooks

A team of NOAA and university sea level rise experts completed a study of more than four decades of water level data, validating foundational research for flood-risk assessment tools. The study verified the accuracy of NOAA’s modeling of historical coastal water level information for areas along the Atlantic and Caribbean coasts and the Gulf of Mexico.

The study used coastal water level stations to determine how coastal flooding has changed over time to benefit NOAA’s current flood-risk assessment tools. The findings are published in the latest edition of Frontiers In Marine Science in an article entitled “Assessment Of Water Levels From 43 Years of NOAA’s Coastal Ocean Reanalysis (CORA) for the Gulf Of Mexico and East Coasts.”

The study examines the impact CORA can have as local and state authorities address increasing flood impacts. Coastal water level information is crucial for understanding flood occurrences, changing flood risks, and to predict future flood likelihood. Scientists from NOAA, the University of Hawaii and the University of North Carolina (UNC) contributed to the study, led by Linta Rose of the University of Hawaii. UNC’s Renaissance Computing Institute provided modeling expertise and high-performance computers to perform the analysis.

“The CORA project couples NOAA’s authoritative data with modern modeling to create data between water level stations,” said NOAA oceanographer Analise Keeney. “It equitably serves coastal communities that need detailed flooding information to plan for and mitigate the impacts of sea level rise.”

The study assesses a preliminary version of CORA for water levels along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Caribbean coasts, where in many locations, coastal flooding is increasing dramatically. Using output from CORA of historical oceanic conditions, the authors assessed hourly coastal water levels over a 43-year period from 1979 to 2021.

read more at ecomagazine.com.