2026/04/22 – NCSU Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
Coastal Engineering Student Takes Home 1st Place Prize at 3MT Competition
Coastal Engineering Student Takes Home 1st Place Prize at 3MT Competition
“The work of civil, construction, and environmental engineers impacts communities, and part of the education students receive here is to ensure they are prepared to communicate effectively with stakeholders they will encounter in their careers,” Kittle Autry said.
As for advice to next year’s participants, Lott said to simply have fun with it.
“This has nothing to do with pressure,” Lott said. “It’s a way to step out of your normal day to day and get a different kind of experience.”
Storm tides — the combination of tides and storm surge — cause flooding in coastal regions, often with differences in magnitudes between the open coast and locations within water bodies like bays and estuaries. Previous studies have shown that storm surge is sensitive to the storm’s wind intensity, speed, and track; the coast’s geometry and relative position to the storm; and also to nonlinear interactions with tides. These sensitivities have been documented at either open coast or bay locations, but without comparing or quantifying the differences in behavior between them, even though these differences may have implications for risk management. This study examines the range of peak storm tides within the Lower Chesapeake Bay, which has vulnerable communities at the open coast, like Virginia Beach, and inside the bay near the James River, like Hampton and Norfolk. A high‐resolution model was developed for the region and validated against observations of water levels during Hurricane Irene in 2011. Storm parameters were perturbed to analyze the variation in storm tide ranges. It was found that the range of possible storm tides was greater at bay locations than at the open coast, by as much as 47%. This higher variability at the bay locations was due to sensitivities to storm parameters like the wind intensity and storm tracks, which led to storm tide peaks outside of the interquartile range. This finding highlights the importance of understanding the uncertainty in storm forecasts concerning future possible impacts in complex coastal regions.
The combined impact of hurricanes and climate change can affect the total water level leading to severe impacts on coastal zones such as flooding. Accurate prediction and evaluation of water levels are essential for predicting the impact on military readiness and resilience for coastal facilities. This study uses D-Flow Flexible Mesh to evaluate the sensitivity of water level and flood area prediction to the impact of climate change and hurricane activity with application to the Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, USA.