The Excellence in Partnering Award is given annually to a NOPP project that best exemplifies the NOPP’s objective of developing a successful network of partnerships to advance the ocean sciences. NHCI team member Winston Cheang and Co-PI Kristin Byrd partnered with remote sensing scientists and modelers on this project to develop RUSH: Rapid Remote Sensing Updates of landcover for Storm and Hurricane forecasts. RUSH is a tool for rapid repeat high resolution coastal vegetation maps to improve forecasting of hurricane impacts and coastal resilience (https://www.usgs.gov/software/rush-rapid-remote-sensing-updates-landcov…). This tool is described in a new publication in the journal Remote Sensing (https://www.usgs.gov/publications/rush-rapid-remote-sensing-updates-lan…).

NHCI has 9 teams, each with a lead principal investigator (PI), consisting of 13 unique academic institutions, 13 government agencies or divisions, and 11 industry performers. The lead PIs are: Jon Moskaitis of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Dean Gesch (retired) and Jeff Danielson of the U.S. Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, Roland Romeiser of the University of Miami, Luca Centurioni of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Jim Thomson of the University of Washington, Jenna Brown of the U.S. Geological Survey, Rick Luettich of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Ap van Dongeren and Kees Nederhoff of Deltares USA, and Maitane Olabarrieta of the University of Florida. 

The goal of NHCI is to improve coastal storm impact prediction, focusing on complex effects like breaching, erosion, and property damage, beyond standard inundation. Three modeling teams used common data to predict impacts from six hurricanes, with public data availability for future research. 

More information about the award can be found at: https://nopp.org/2025/2025-excellence-in-partnering-award/. 

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