CAREER: The Effects of Spatiotemporal Storm Surge Clusters on Coastal Flood Risk

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).In September of 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria caused strong winds, rainfall, and storm surges in Puerto Rico within less than two weeks of each other. Two years later, in 2019, Hurricane Dorian caused high storm surges in the Bahamas and southeastern U.S. adversely impacting thousands of kilometers of coastline. When multiple storm surges, or other hazards, affect the same area in relatively close succession (i.e., temporal clustering) or when longer coastlines stretches are often impacted simultaneously by the same storm surge event (i.e., spatial clustering), compounding effects in time and space with potentially devastating impacts to coastal communities occur while also straining (re-)insurance and government budgets for rebuilding homes and other infrastructure. Despite many recent examples, these compounding effects, which will be further exacerbated by continuing sea-level rise, are ignored in current coastal risk assessments. The research goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to illuminate where existing dependencies in space and time make such events more likely, how they are changing through time, and how humans and the built environment are affected by them. This will lead to better-informed decisions to mitigate short- and long-term risk and facilitate more efficient emergency response and coastal adaptation planning. A new generation of diverse coastal researchers and practitioners will be trained to be able to work across science and engineering disciplines by integrating classroom instruction, summer training and networking events, and outreach activities with community partners. Transformative knowledge will be developed by (1) using historic observational data and model hindcasts to identify regional hotspots of spatial and temporal storm surge clusters, (2) assessing non-stationarity, including trends and variability, in the frequency of temporal clusters and in the size of spatial clusters and the links to large-scale climate modes, (3) deriving innovative multivariate statistical methods to account for spatiotemporal clusters alongside known and unknown covariates, and (4) incorporate spatiotemporal storm surge clusters into broad-scale coastal risk assessments for present-day climate and when considering future sea-level rise scenarios. The latter will account for the dynamic linkages between the hazard and socio-economic drivers of risk while deriving innovative impact metrics relevant for coastal decision makers, e.g. the likelihood that x people are affected or x dollars of damages are incurred in a given year, or over a decade. Exploratory work will also focus on incorporating additional hazards (e.g., pluvial and/or fluvial flooding drivers, extreme wind, heat-stress) into the analysis to build the foundation for future multi-hazard risk assessments accounting for spatiotemporal clustering and compounding effects of connected climate extremes.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.