NC Sea Grant researcher Katherine Anarde and her team studied flooding in three NC, communities, Beaufort, Sea Level, and Carolina Beach, using a network of land-based sensors. The research offers a new picture of coastal flooding.
The study was published in Communications Earth and Environment and covered in the Washington Post in early June: “Many coastal communities are flooding more than we thought, researchers find.”
Partially funded by an NC Sea Grant Core Research Funding Grant, the research provided “new estimates of flood frequency” by installing an open-source network of sensors in stormwater drains and adjacent roadways and comparing its data to tide-gauges that record the height of rising and falling tides as well as other parameters such as wind speed and direction and temperature. What the team found was a “mismatch between actual flood incidence and tide-gauge threshold exceedances,” according to the Communications Earth and Environment article.
This means that coastal communities flood more often than the number of “high-tide flooding days” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tide-gauges project.
Given Anarde’s findings, land-based sensors offer an additional tool for measuring a range of flooding events. For the researchers, “Improving the accuracy of coastal flood measures is critical for identifying the impacts of sea-level rise and developing effective adaptation strategies.”
