Category Archives: In the News

News: Spotlight on Sarah Grace

2026/03/16 – Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center
Researcher Spotlight – Sarah Grace Lott

What results are you finding? Coastal communities on the North Carolina Outer Banks are engaged and want to plan for more resilient futures. By modeling adaptations, such as returning sections of the barrier islands to natural processes or raising the elevation of marshes, we have found that some of the preferred adaptations to reduce flooding actually led to more widespread flooding within communities. We have also found that adaptations have local effects on flooding. Looking to the future, communities will need to coordinate across the entire region to lead to widespread resiliency.

Who will benefit from your research? This research directly benefits the community members of the North Carolina Outer Banks. Our work is grounded in community participation. All of our research questions and modeling scenarios are directly informed by the people who live in vulnerable communities. My goal is that by seeing the potential outcomes of different choices modeled out, these communities will have a powerful new tool to help them envision, discuss, and plan for a more resilient future.

News: Key Bridge

2026/02/18 – NCSU Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
The Baltimore Bridge Collapse: Understanding Water Currents and a Disaster’s Aftermath

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While the simulators don’t explain the whole event, like why the Dali lost power in the first place, the models do explain how the local currents contributed to the ship’s drift toward the bridge. “The currents were stronger on the ship’s port side, and they caused it to turn southward and allide with the bridge pier,” Dietrich said.

The research team investigated a number of factors that could have influenced the Dali allision, such as channel depth, current speed and sea level rise. The researchers discovered that the ship’s drift motion was highly sensitive to uncertainties related to both the ship itself and its environment. In fact, they found that if the Dali had lost power just one minute later, the ship would have been much more likely to drift under the bridge unscathed.

News: Erosion Forecast Framework

2025/01/22 – NCSU Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
New technology forecasts beach and dune erosion before hurricanes strike

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“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.

News: NC State on the Coast

2024/10/08 – NC State
NC State faculty and students are helping to keep coastal communities healthy through the North Carolina Center for Coastal Algae, People and Environment

NC C-CAPE (and our fearless leader Astrid Schnetzer) were featured on the NC State homepage.

NC C-CAPE was featured on the NC State homepage. Lots of information and quotes from folks in the center, including great photos of our colleagues in the field and laboratory. It is fun to contribute to such a large, meaningful research effort.

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“In the past few months, we’ve officially started to sample as NC C-CAPE,” [Barrett] Rose said. “It was a shock to see the magnitude of how much we were actually studying. It went from a small pilot study to a huge center effort.”

Data collection and analysis is only the first part of the work NC C-CAPE seeks to do. While harmful algal blooms are common in fresh waters across the U.S. and the world, major data gaps around the issue exist. [Astrid] Schnetzer’s data will inform NC C-CAPE’s other two projects, which focus on predicting the health risks of toxic algal blooms on mammals and humans, as well as considering how factors like climate change will affect future toxin levels in water and seafood.

“The most exciting aspect of NC C-CAPE for me is that the research doesn’t end where my expertise ends,” said Schnetzer. “What we learn from the field about algal toxins is handed to the next team to look at the bigger picture on the ecosystem level and in connection to human health.”

News: Oceans and Human Health Center

2024/03/19 – NCSU Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
CCEE faculty to advance understanding of toxic algae blooms, protect human health as part of new NSF, NIEHS Center at NC State

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Obenour will lead a project with Dietrich and Natalie Nelson (Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering) focused on the development of models to predict the transport of cyanotoxins — toxins produced by cyanobacteria released in algae blooms — in coastal environments. The models will focus on coastal North Carolina, especially the estuaries and sounds where freshwaters mix with saline waters. With the models, researchers will evaluate where cyanotoxins may collect and where they may originate. They will also evaluate scenarios of future climate, such as how changes in temperature, river flows, and sea levels may affect the transport of cyanotoxin.

According to Obenour, “the research will protect public health by identifying cyanotoxin hotspots and by informing management actions to reduce cyanotoxin risks in the future.”

2024/02/28 – NCSU College of Sciences
NC State Receives $6.9 Million From NSF, NIEHS to Fund New Oceans and Human Health Center

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NC C-CAPE will carry out three research projects. The goal of the first project is to understand the dynamics of harmful algal blooms and learn more about the presence and distribution of microcystin — a liver toxin — across the Pamlico-Albemarle Sound System, the country’s largest lagoonal estuary. They will then link spatiotemporal patterns to the contamination of seafood. The second project will define how microcystin mixtures influence mechanisms of liver toxicity in regulatory-relevant mammalian models and at-risk human populations. In the third project, researchers will work to predict microcystin distributions in water and seafood based on various environmental controls — and assess exposure risk in a changing climate. They will do so by integrating diverse data sets and coastal circulation modeling within a probabilistic modeling framework.

News: Department Social Media

2023/06/01 — NCSU Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
YouTube

ncsu-engrJack Voight was featured on social media in a video about his summer research in our REU program. He is running simulations of storm surge and coastal flooding as part of a project about total water levels at coastal infrastructure. Glad he is part of our team!

News: Preparing for a Changing Climate

2023/01/11 – UDaily, University of Delaware
UD civil engineers lead research to examine models for coastal readiness at U.S. military bases

University of Delaware civil engineers are leading a multi-institutional effort to identify the best models to calculate flood risk at coastal military installations where climate change threatens to increase the risk of flood damage from sea level rise and storm surge.

The four-year project, which launched in mid-2022 and will run through spring 2025, is funded by a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Project partners include faculty and students from the Netherlands, North Carolina State University, the University of South Alabama, Texas A&M and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

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“The goal is to provide guidance to the DoD about the strengths and weaknesses of each model in comparison. They’re all going to have things they’re good with and things they struggle with,” Dietrich said. Those comparisons will help the agencies decide what types of models they want to use to get what types of information — depending on how much time, effort and funding they want to commit.

There’s also a goal of reducing cost and building smarter models, he said.

“If we are able to improve our predictions at very specific sites along the coast, we also can have better predictions at other specific sites along the coast, like someone’s house or a bridge or other infrastructure,” Dietrich said.