New technology forecasts beach and dune erosion before hurricanes strike
“Physics-based models can predict how the dune may be lowered, and how much water may flood behind it,” said Jess Gorski (MS 2023), who worked with Professor Casey Dietrich on the project. “Our forecasts can provide information about coastal change to decision makers during a storm.”
In collaboration with the USGS, CCEE researchers developed a framework for running the eXtreme Beach (XBeach) model in real time. The U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts are described with thousands of transects, which quantify the offshore depths and the shape of the beach and dune at intervals of 500 m to 2 km along the coast. When a storm approaches, the framework can select the transects that may be affected, and then run a few hundred simulations of the coastal erosion.