Coastal communities face heightened risk to coastal flooding and erosion hazards due to sea-level rise, changing storminess patterns, and evolving human development pressures. Incorporating uncertainty associated with both climate change and the range of possible adaptation measures is essential for projecting the evolving exposure to coastal flooding and erosion, as...
Probabilistic flood hazard assessment is a promising methodology for estuarine risk assessment but currently remains limited by prohibitively long simulation times. This study addresses this problem through the development of an emulator, or surrogate model, which replaces the simulator (in this case the coupled ADCIRC+SWAN model) with a statistical representation...
Extreme water levels generating flooding in estuarine and coastal environments are often driven by compound events, where many individual processes such as waves, storm surge, streamflow, and tides coincide. Despite this, extreme water levels are typically modeled in isolated open-coast or estuarine environments, potentially mischaracterizing the true risk of flooding...
Coupled models of coastal hazards, ecosystems, socioeconomics, and landscape management in conjunction with alternative scenario analysis provide tools that can allow decision-makers to explore effects of policy decisions under uncertain futures. Here, we describe the development and assessment of a set of model-based alternative future scenarios examining climate and population...
Coastal communities are increasingly experiencing climate change–induced coastal disasters and chronic flooding and erosion. Decision makers and the public alike are struggling to reconcile the lack of ‘‘fit’’ between a rapidly changing environment and relatively rigid governance structures. In efforts to bridge this environment-governance gap in Tillamook County, Oregon, stakeholders...
Coastal and estuarine flooding and erosion events are usually driven by the cumulative effect of multiple individual processes like waves, streamflow, storm surge, and/or tides. This dissertation focuses on separating the influence of the regional and local-scale geomorphologic and hydrodynamic processes driving variability in the magnitude and impacts of extreme...
This report assesses climate change impacts and associated community and ecosystem vulnerability. It was compiled by a group of Oregon State University researchers and students, outreach specialists, and coastal community members in Tillamook County, Oregon (OR). Through sustained engagement with the Tillamook County Coastal Futures Knowledge to Action Network (TCCF...
Coastal flood hazard zones and the design of coastal defenses are often devised using the maximum
recorded water level or a ‘‘design’’ event such as the 100 year return level, usually projected from
observed extremes. Despite technological advances driving more consistent instrumental records of waves
and water levels, the observational...
Coastal flood hazard zones and the design of coastal defenses are often devised using either the maximum recorded total water level (TWL) or a 'design' event such as the 100-year return-level flood, usually projected from observed extreme events. Despite technological advances driving more consistent instrumental records of wave heights and...