Coastal Flooding

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As the Earth's climate continues to change, hurricanes and other tropical events are becoming more frequent and more intense. A significant cause of damage associated with these events is linked to storm surge -- an abnormal rise in sea level above the normal tidal level. In the first part of this exercise, we analyzed damage that occurred from Hurricane Sandy along a barrier island off the coast of New Jersey called Mantoloking. Red indicates areas of erosion and blue indicates areas of debris buildup or sand accretion. 




In the second part of this exercise, we predicted coastal flooding that would occur due to a 1 meter storm surge using two different digital elevation models (DEMs) -- a high-resolution LiDAR DEM and a regular resolution USGS DEM. We then analyzed the number of buildings that would be impacted based on each of these DEMs. The total number of buildings impacted based on the USGS DEM was nearly twice the amount based on the LiDAR DEM. This significant difference is due to the courser resolution of the USGS data. 





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