Research

Coastal flooding associated with sea level rise and more intense storm events poses a serious risk to California communities and the infrastructure upon which they rely. As communities and other coastal stakeholders nationwide engage in adaptation planning to mitigate the impacts of flooding, developing site-specific modeling is critical for evaluating the efficacy of proposed projects and policies to improve outcomes for residents and the built and natural environments. This project will implement a mature, coupled groundwater-surface water modeling system developed previously by the project team to evaluate the performance of proposed shoreline adaptation actions and to inform the design and implementation of flood mitigation strategies that enhance coastal resilience. Project outputs will provide coastal managers and other partners with locally relevant guidance on the hydrologic, socioeconomic, and ecological implications of sea level rise and the degree to which proposed management solutions achieve priorities related to resiliency and equity.

The US Gulf Coast, and Texas in particular, has aging oil and gas infrastructure that is critical to the nation’s energy supply, including major refineries and supporting industries. Although these companies have robust safety and risk assessment plans in place for averting major industrial disasters, they are dependent on local and municipal infrastructure and resources, in particular water infrastructure, for continuity of operations during and after natural disasters. Managing this infrastructure in the face of rising threats of catastrophic flooding is a key challenge to communities, businesses, and emergency managers operating in the region. This project will partner with regional entities to incorporate a climate-informed risk assessment framework in their decision systems, which will facilitate adoption of adaptation measures that will maximize the resilience of energy and water infrastructure to potential disruptions caused by catastrophic flooding.

The Coastal Bend Region (CBR) of Texas is vulnerable to acute and chronic environmental stressors stemming from natural and industrial sources, including flooding and erosion from high tides, storm surge events, and ship traffic, as well as higher levels of air and water pollution due to expansion of nearby industrial operations. Despite the multitude of environmental hazards facing the region, formal monitoring systems are limited and provide an incomplete view of local-level conditions. In addition, networks for communication and decision-making are often localized and/or fragmented. As a result, CBR communities lack the comprehensive data and decision-making structures needed to plan for, respond to, and mitigate the impacts of potential hazards. This project will apply a mixed-methods approach to advance the understanding of how smart and connected technologies can be integrated into and support regional communication networks to build adaptive capacity in the face of cumulative impacts from climate change and industrial expansion, using the CBR as an exemplar. Research activities will be co-developed and coordinated with residents, community-based organizations, elected officials, and city/county staff to strengthen multidisciplinary, cross-sector partnerships, enhance public engagement with science and technology, and broaden participation by underrepresented groups and frontline communities in the scientific process.

The severity and cost of flood events continue to increase in the US, often with disproportionate impacts on marginalized populations who may have higher sensitivity to the negative effects of flooding and lower capacity to adapt. Understanding what makes communities vulnerable or resilient to flooding is critical to developing mitigation actions that can reduce the negative effects of future hazards. However, existing frameworks for assessing resilience often fall short, as they are unable to measure the dynamic and highly localized factors that influence peoples’ ability to cope with, adapt to, and recover from natural hazards. This project aims to develop a bottom-up, community-driven framework for local-level resilience assessment by generating and utilizing high-resolution crowdsourced datasets and leveraging local knowledge and experiences to examine how the factors contributing to resilience (i.e., exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity) vary over space and time. Insights from this research will highlight dimensions and contributing factors that cause vulnerabilities within a community and will inform resilience-building efforts aimed at advancing our national welfare. Crowdsourcing efforts using Streetwyze, a BIPOC-led community-driven mapping platform, will increase the awareness of flooding and its daily impacts within partner communities and encourage diverse voices to participate in the collection of data to support local planning efforts.

Texas coastal communities have historically been exposed to environmental threats from natural and industrial sources. In Ingleside on the Bay (IOB), a small, rural community situated along the shoreline of Corpus Christi Bay, tropical storms and high rates of relative sea-level rise cause extreme and nuisance flooding, while industrial expansion is placing stress on the community’s way of life and the natural resources upon which it relies. Such communities lack the comprehensive data needed to advocate for and make informed decisions about risk reduction strategies to mitigate the impacts of industrial growth and climate change. This proposal engages with the nonprofit Ingleside on the Bay Coastal Watch Association (IOBCWA), community members, and governmental representatives to assess the role of distributed, real-time sensor technology in improving IOB’s capacity to respond to dynamic environmental conditions that affect the quality of its air, water, and land resources. It also examines how emerging community-based nonprofits like IOBCWA engage with diverse organizations in response to new threats and how they can utilize environmental sensing data in planning and advocacy efforts.

Flooding in Houston, Texas, has intensified in recent years under the triple threat of rapid urbanization, increased climate variability, and insufficient stormwater infrastructure. Low-income families are more likely to live in neighborhoods with deficient stormwater infrastructure, making them particularly vulnerable to flooding. Communities are increasingly recognizing the potential of green infrastructure (GI) in capturing and conveying stormwater, while simultaneously enhancing water quality and quality of life. This project aims to develop (1) recommendations for cost-effective GI suitable for urbanized coastal neighborhoods, (2) a climate-informed framework for assessing the costs and benefits of such installations in a vulnerable community, and (3) recommendations for partnering with vulnerable communities to advance GI projects. These results will be shared with local government leaders to inform their planning process.

The objective of this project is to advance the fundamental, mechanistic understanding of how groundwater, surface water, and soil surface elevations interact and influence coastal ecosystem resilience. The research team will couple hydrodynamic, groundwater, and marsh evolution models to forecast the ecohydrologic implications of future management and sea-level rise conditions in the Herring River Estuary in Massachusetts. Project results will directly inform the efforts of federal agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to protect coastal environments while maintaining beneficial habitats.

Approximately 53% of bridge failures in the United States are caused by hydraulic events, including floods, scour, debris, drifts, etc. One of TxDOT's responsibilities is to develop policies, design standards, manuals, and guidelines for the design, maintenance, and construction of safe and comprehensive state bridge systems. TxDOT's design policy requires shear keys in stream crossing bridges, based on a freeboard 100-year flood level, but this design policy is not applicable to bridges with significant stream velocity and debris in 25-year and 50-year flood conditions. This project will use scale flume experiments and numerical models to accurately estimate design forces and resisting details that ensure adequate bridge performance during a design flood. Our team will use the National Bridge Inventory (NBI) and hydraulic and hydrology data sources to identify bridges that have the potential to become inundated during high velocity flow events and perform CFD modeling to simulate hydrodynamic forces on bridge decks.

Sea level rise (SLR) poses significant threats to coastal communities, including more frequent and severe flooding of terrestrial areas as well as the potential loss of coastal ecosystems and the protective and non-protective services they provide. The opportunity to maximize and extend non-protective services while still protecting against flooding highlights the benefit of using natural and nature-based features (NNBF) over gray infrastructure to combat SLR. Importantly, developing effective mitigation and adaptation strategies for coastal communities requires the prediction of the SLR flooding hazard and the resilience of NNBF within the changing physiochemical environment. The purpose of the proposed study is to identify and constrain the role of NNBF and gray engineering approaches in controlling local and bay-scale hydrodynamics, groundwater dynamics, and long-term coastal ecosystem sustainability for present-day and future sea level conditions. To accomplish this, we will develop a coupled modeling framework that incorporates coastal hydrodynamics, density-dependent groundwater flow, and wetland accretion processes to compare the effectiveness of NNBF and gray infrastructure strategies in reducing SLR-driven flood hazards, using Santa Monica Bay and Humboldt Bay in California as case studies.

Communities along the Texas coast are exposed to the triple threats of storm surge, rainfall-driven flooding, and flooding due to sea-level rise. Among the most vulnerable infrastructure systems are the water supply and wastewater treatment systems. The proposed initiative is a collaborative effort between UTA, the Texas Water Development Board, the Lower Neches Valley Authority (LNVA), and the City of Beaumont to identify and assess climate-informed adaptation measures for water supply and wastewater treatment systems operated by LNVA and the City of Beaumont. Our group will focus on improving modeling of joint riverine and coastal flood hazards and their impacts on water infrastructure, considering nonstationarity in climate.