Tide Together: Expanding water level monitoring for Cape Cod’s coastal resilience

Abstract

Rates of global sea-level rise have doubled over the past three decades. As a result, coastal flooding, including high-tide flooding, is occurring more frequently, with negative impacts on coastal communities, economies, and infrastructure. Indeed, flooding is now the most costly natural disaster in the United States. To support regional, state, and local preparedness, and to foster safety, security, and resilience, we need dedicated, multi-scale coastal-flooding and water-level observing networks. However, present-day coastal ocean observing systems do not have the spatial coverage of water-level measurements necessary for monitoring all the relevant scales, magnitudes, and mechanisms of coastal flooding. Because of this, basic questions remain open regarding the nature and causes of coastal flooding trends, and communities are left without the data they need to guide science-informed decision making to support flood preparation and response efforts, and to make cost-effective infrastructure decisions and investments.

The project will empower coastal communities on Cape Cod with robust, low-cost, ultrasonic water-level sensors that provide data to guide policy, decision making, and investment; to validate coastal flood risk models; and to advance the scientific understanding of coastal floods and their relation to surges, tides, and mean sea-level changes. We will collaborate with Cape Cod’s 15 communities to develop and deploy a network of 30 real-time water-level sensors across Cape Cod to monitor coastal water levels across a range of space and time scales. The sensors will be installed in a variety of environments, from developed sites including harbors to undeveloped locations like marshes, so observations from this network will strengthen planning, preparedness, security, and resilience across sectors. Data from these sensors will also reveal the scales, magnitudes, and drivers of coastal water-level variability, and relationships between water levels and coastal impacts such as high-tide flooding. To communicate research findings to scientific audiences, we will publish peer-reviewed papers and technical reports. We will also engage with regional stakeholders, practitioners, and other non-profit and business partners to produce press releases, hold four community forum events, host a regional workshop, and build a project website to share data in real time, promote public awareness, and provide practical application of the project outcomes. More broadly, project efforts will add to a growing body of knowledge on the use of low-cost sensors for monitoring coastal hazards generally, and the use of hyper-local, real-time, ultrasonic sensor networks for coastal inundation and water level specifically.