Science Seminar Series

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Tuesday, August 3, 2021 10:00am PDT

Sean Vitousek, USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center

Satellites enable national-scale predictions of coastal change

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Abstract: Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey and elsewhere increasingly rely on computer modeling to help understand and predict large-scale, long-term coastal change.  However, achieving accurate modeling predictions requires thorough and thoughtful integration with observational data to calibrate and validate models. Unfortunately, field observations of coastal change are often spatiotemporally sparse, since data-collection efforts are often limited to a handful of local monitoring sites. Satellites promise to dramatically increase the spatiotemporal resolution of observational data, enabling robust predictions of coastal change like never before.  Here we present a coastal change modeling application (using the CoSMoS-COAST model – Vitousek et al., 2017, 2021) to the entire 1,350 km coastline of California.  The model is assimilated with satellite-derived shoreline observations from the CoastSat toolbox (Vos et al., 2019).  We demonstrate that Satellite observations show excellent agreement with traditional GPS surveys, when corrections for tide and wave setup are applied.  We show that the model demonstrates good agreement with 5 years of validation data (achieving a median RMS error of ~10 m in the forecasted shoreline position across California).  Finally, we contend that the combination of data-integrated coastal change models with satellite observations represents the basis for national-scale predictions of coastal change, and we suggest steps for realizing this EarthMAP-like system.

Tuesday, August 10, 2021 10:00am PDT

Li Erikson and Ann Gibbs, USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center

TBA

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Natural Bridges State Beach, shown here in the middle of the photo, is nestled amongst coastal neighborhoods in the southwestern part of Santa Cruz, California. View is looking south. The offices of the USGS Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center are just a few hundred feet north, outside the bottom portion of the photograph.

Photo by Laura Torresan