Storm Impacts

Exchange of flows, sediment, and biological particles between the inner shelf and back-barrier estuaries are significant for determination of extreme water levels, maintenance and formation of inlets, barrier-island evolution, and pollutant and larval transport. These connections are controlled by cross-shore processes including wave-driven inner-shelf and near-shore processes, dune overtopping...

The Core Laboratories Project is a research support service of the WHCMSC which provides analytical and technical infrastructure, and supports of a range of projects associated with Coastal Biogeochemical Processes, Coastal Groundwater, and Sedimentology.

Policy-makers, individuals from government agencies, and natural resource managers are under increasing pressure to manage changing coastal areas to meet social, economic, and natural resource demands, particularly under a regime of sea-level rise. Scientific knowledge of coastal processes and habitat-use can support decision-makers as they balance these often-conflicting human and ecological...

Numerical models are used by scientists, engineers, coastal managers, and the public to understand and predict processes in the coastal ocean. This project supports the development and application of open-source coastal models and has several objectives: 1) improve the code of numerical sediment-transport models by implementing new or improved algorithms; 2) obtain measurements of coastal ocean...

Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are located at an active plate boundary between the North American plate and the northeast corner of the Caribbean plate. Plate movements have caused large magnitude earthquakes and devastating tsunamis. The USGS has an ongoing program to identify and map the faults in this region using various geophysical and geological methods in order to estimate the location...

The primary objective of this project is to increase our understanding of the physical processes that cause coastal change, and ultimately improve our capability to predict the processes and their impacts. This will be approached by using geophysical surveys, oceanographic studies, and predictive models to investigate the interactions of shoreline, nearshore, and offshore sediment transport...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is mapping sea-floor geology and sedimentary environments offshore of Rhode Island. This site provides links to bathymetric, sidescan-sonar, sediment, photographic, seismic-reflection, and interpretive datasets, all presented in Geographic Information System (GIS) formats and...

This project is complete and the website is archived and no longer updated. Lake Mead is one of the world's largest man-made reservoirs at about 600 sq km, roughly the size of Chicago. Lake Mead started to form on the Colorado River in 1935, upon completion of the Hoover Dam. Since then, the lake has supplied water to agricultural, industrial, recreational, and municipal users in the southwestern...

This project is complete and the website is archived and no longer updated. Long Island Sound is a major coastal estuary near the New York-Connecticut metropolitan area. More than eight million people live in its watershed. Due to the enormous population, the Sound is used heavily and its sea floor has been impacted by human activities. There are many benthic habitats in the Sound that support...

This project is complete and the website is archived and no longer updated. The New York-New Jersey metropolitan area is the most populated region of the United States. New York city, with a population of about 8 million, is the largest city in the United States and the New York & New Jersey metropolitan area, with a population of about 20 million, is the second largest in the world. The harbor...