Coastal Resilience Project with USGS and Partners Receives Nearly $1 Million in Funds From NOAA
CoSMoS-COAST is a USGS-developed, large-scale coastal change prediction model. It seeks to model coastal change due to a variety of oceanographic and terrestrial processes across a multitude of spatiotemporal scales (e.g., local to national-scale).
Beaches, the first line of defense against extreme coastal storms, are thinning due to chronic erosion caused by rising sea levels, declining sediment supply, and entrenched coastal infrastructure. Reliable, quantitative predictions of coastal change are increasingly sought to support coastal management. Yet, few well-validated models exist.
CoSMoS-COAST is a USGS-developed, large-scale coastal change prediction model. It seeks to model coastal change due to a variety of oceanographic and terrestrial processes across a multitude of spatiotemporal scales (e.g., local to national-scale). The model was initially developed and applied as part of the larger USGS Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS) in Southern California. The CoSMoS-COAST model is unique in the scientific community because it applies data assimilation to calibrate site-specific behavior and characteristics into large-scale modeling applications. Recently, the model has been improved to integrate weekly satellite-derived shoreline observations of individual beaches over large regions (e.g., the entire California coastline), which provide a thousandfold increase in the amount of observational data to assimilate.
Through this and other research efforts, we continue to enhance the model towards the goal of providing national-scale predictions of coastal change. Additionally, we have sought to improve model workflows to incorporate output from other coastal change models in order to provide multi-model ensemble predictions.
Objectives
- Integrate satellite-derived observations of shoreline position into CoSMoS-COAST;
- Evaluate the accuracy of satellite-derived shoreline observations compared to traditional (e.g., LIDAR, GPS) surveys;
- Evaluate the accuracy of coastal change modeling predictions over large scales;
- Improve modeling capabilities of beach nourishments and fluvial (i.e. river) sediment inputs to the coastal zone;
- Integrate CoSMoS-COAST with dynamical models of beach and cliff position; and
- Integrate modern coastal change prediction methodology, based on CoSMoS-COAST, into the USGS Total Water Level (TWL) viewer based on the same wave and hydrodynamic forcing conditions.
