On April 3rd, the Climate Science Alliance hosted our ninth Climate Change Mini Forum featuring Dr. Juliette Finzi Hart from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Dr. Hart discussed the development and capabilities of the Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS), a dynamic modeling approach that has been developed by the USGS in order to allow for more detailed predictions of coastal flooding due to both future sea level rise and storms integrated with long-term coastal evolution over large geographic areas. What makes the model dynamic is the inclusion of wind, waves, atmospheric pressure, shoreline changes which provides a range of sea level rise and storm scenarios. Dr. Hart gave a demonstration of the Our Coast, Our Future interactive map that allows users to view potential impacts of a variety of sea level and storm scenarios and the USGS Hazard Exposure Reporting and Analytics (HERA) application which integrates potential socioeconomic impacts with the sea level rise and storm scenarios. She also discussed some of the unique and creative ways that this data is being shared with the public using Virtual Reality experiences and Citizen Science projects.
The mini forum ended with a thought-provoking discussion of the potential applications of CoSMoS. Thank you, Juliette for sharing this new and exciting approach for modeling flood potential at the local level.
