SCC-CIVIC-PG Track A: Ocean Model Infrastructure For A Resilient Coastal City

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Climate change poses significant challenges for coastal cities and ports. In coming decades, coastal cities will contend with sea-level rise, increasing storm intensity, warming waters, changes in precipitation, threats to water quality, and shifts in coastal marine ecosystem. For industrialized cities, like Portland, Maine, which is selected as a pilot location, this is in addition to managing the complex socio-economic structure of a modern port. This research provides a novel approach involving methods for deploying coastal science, high-resolution modeling, and direct community engagement to benefit coastal cities like Portland in order to improve community resilience. It involves work on a novel, comprehensive, coastal hydrodynamic model that integrates data on air and water temperature, salinity, wind, currents, features of the coastline and seafloor, and other relevant parameters. To benefit coastal cities, however, models must link to and reflect community needs because access to data is not enough. Informed decisions and community resilience depend on information at spatial and temporal scales that matter to decision-makers in ways that are easily digestible, accurate, transparent, accessible, and useful. Portland, Maine is a small coastal city, with a vibrant working waterfront and complex port operation. Because of its relatively small scale, compared to other ports like Baltimore or Los Angeles, Portland, Maine is an ideal testing ground for developing scalable methods for integrating ocean science into local governance. Goals of the work will be to build and validate an urban ocean model of Portland Harbor coupled from the start to urban infrastructure and community needs. Broader impacts of the work include providing critical information in a useful manner to decision makers, land-use planners, and the community with a comprehensive package from which current and future conditions in the port and coastal ocean area can be considered. Such a utility will help coastal cities assess risks and prepare for storms and other hazards. The model also can also be used to inform port operations and emergency management, to support oil spill response, and to facilitate coastal water quality management. The project has identified three initial coastal management challenges where insight from hydrodynamic models can address a number of important civic concerns: flood risk and storm surge remediation and adaptation; water quality monitoring and management; and port operations, especially dredging and sediment management. In this Phase 1 project, university researchers will work with municipal leaders, waterfront businesses, and at-risk communities to define information needs and develop modeling strategies to address community challenges. In the Phase 2 follow-on pilot, the project will develop and validate an operational hydrodynamic model of Portland Harbor (based on lower-resolution models that already exist) and conduct additional model runs (“scenarios”) needed to answer questions identified by our civic partners. Working closely with end-users, the project will create novel, new, sophisticated data products, like dashboards and visualizations, that are user-friendly and easy to use to deliver insights from the urban ocean model to support local decisions. The approach applied for this project has the potential for scaling and translation to other coastal cities with port operations.This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track A. Living in a changing climate: pre-disaster action around adaptation, resilience, and mitigation—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.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.