Coastal Tools and Technology for Resilience

Natural disasters and environmental hazards pose risks to roads, bridges, port facilities and critical infrastructure in America’s coastal communities. The potential impacts represent a diverse mix, from hurricane-induced storm surge along the Gulf of Mexico and southeastern Atlantic Ocean, to extreme wave runup and overtopping caused by far-field swell events on the Pacific Coast.

Skyrocketing coastal populations combined with the growing threat of climate change further exacerbate these hazards, highlighting the need for tools that can predict potential impacts and provide adaptable and scalable solutions to any region along the U.S. coast.

Understanding critical infrastructure risk requires informed knowledge of the physical and environmental dynamics that drive the natural systems throughout the coastal region, and it requires advanced tools to guide the risk evaluation process. Due to this complexity, advanced technologies such as coastal numerical modeling are an important tool that we rely on to support planning and design efforts for coastal infrastructure projects.  Vital, future-proof components of these projects that serve our communities are dictated by model results, and as such, they require the development of numerical models that have a high degree of fidelity and accuracy.

A significant amount of data and technological resources are required to develop accurate coastal models. Model configurations must consider the geometry of the system, including shorelines, bathymetry, topography and more, as well as the extents of the natural features, such as estuaries and sediment characteristics. Additionally, the coupling, or combining, of multiple models is an increasingly common requirement to deliver the best solution for a project. This coupling is necessary to capture the large-scale physical processes that influence coastal regions, including storm surge and wave propagation, along with local-scale, site-specific processes that require significant model detail, such as sediment transport.

Often times, execution of these models requires computing horsepower and data storage needs that far exceed normal PC limits. It’s common for one project simulation to produce gigabytes of data with dozens, if not hundreds, of simulations needed in total to fully evaluate all relevant scenarios for a community. As a result, we engage powerful cloud computing resources to perform simulations using upwards of several hundred processors working in parallel to complete one simulation. Utilizing these high-performance computing clusters saves a significant amount of time and allows us to evaluate many alternatives or what-if scenarios within the defined project schedule.

The expertise and hardware needed to run these models shouldn’t be viewed as a barrier to entry for communities, but rather as a necessary step in understanding the complexity of coastal waters and how they interact with community infrastructure and natural systems. Once enabled, the model results can be harnessed to answer questions communities have about how climate change will impact them, and what action they can take to become more resilient.

Over the last 10, years we have developed the AtkinsRéalis Simulation Framework—a foundation mobilizing powerful tools and models for simulating climate change impacts in the future. SeaPort Simulator is used to simulate climate impacts on global supply chains moving through ports around the world. Installation Simulator is used to assess risk to military installations. City Simulator serves as our flagship resilience tool in the framework. 

With City Simulator, a community can create a digital twin of itself and evolve day by day over the next several decades. The digital twin includes every building, parcel, road segment, utility pipe network and many other physical features. Agent-based, it deploys a statistically-matched population that moves around the community daily—commuting, going to school, participating in recreation and so on. During the simulation, the community is simulated growing its economy, population and infrastructure. Complex coastal models are integrated into City Simulator, allowing the community to consider many solutions while relying on the hard science and engineering needed to accurately estimate coastal water dynamics. This includes the simulation of climate-change-influenced events like hurricanes, heat waves and drought. When these events occur, the disruption to community residents is captured as flooded homes, places of work and commute paths. The result is a rich picture of the vulnerable spots across the community, both now and in the future. 

City Simulator has been used in communities ranging from five thousand people to the 1.1 million person US-74 transportation corridor between Charlotte and Wilmington, North Carolina. It has been used to address challenges like which bridges and culverts need hardening and elevation to minimize flooding disruption in the future; where redundant routes should be installed to ensure disadvantaged populations can survive after hurricanes; whether bus stops should be air conditioned in the future in urban areas to counteract commuters moving away from transit in increasing heat; and the degree to which improved city-wide WiFi will reduce flood disruption by encouraging working from home. By integrating flood, traffic, economic and demographic models, City Simulator empowers communities to explore their options and enable critical resiliencies.  

Upgrading our aging infrastructure and making coastal communities more resilient will not be simple or easy. But, by applying advanced coastal tools and technology, important project parameters and outcomes can be better predicted and understood, which will improve resiliency and provide more certainty for local stakeholders in future-proof community planning and design.

Want more?

Listen to the Built + Beyond podcast Coastal Resilience: Tools & Technologies episode as our experts discuss the challenges that coastal communities are facing from climate change and the need to improve aging infrastructure and make communities more resilient.