The Community Rating System (CRS) is a flood mitigation program of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Recent research shows that the program has led to a substantial increase in flood insurance purchases and decreased claims payments, but our understanding of participation rate under specific activities is limited. The CRS has four major activity series: Public Information, Mapping and Regulation, Flood Damage Reduction, and Warning and Response. This work analyzes where communities earn most of their points by series and activities. The focus will be on four major flood-prone states: California, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Data were obtained on CRS activity choices and credits earned between 1999-2018. Credit points earned under Mapping and Regulation account for 61% of all credit points earned in these four states, Flood Damage Reduction accounts for 33%, Public Information accounts for 18%, and Warning and Response account for 4%. We found 8 specific activities under the 4 major activity series that received lowest participation. They are: levees, flood insurance promotion, flood protection, flood warning and response, acquisition and relocations, flood protection, flood protection assistance, and drainage system management.

As sea levels rise around the globe, adaption is becoming increasingly critical to ensure resilience of our coastal communities, ecosystems, and economies. Though sea levels are rising around the globe, sea level is not rising at the same rate everywhere. In addition to the global rise in sea level, known as eustatic sea-level rise (SLR), there are local influences that may exacerbate or slow down SLR at specific locations along our coasts. The largest example of this is vertical land motion, where uplift or sediment compaction changes the height of the land itself which can diminish or increase SLR. In the northern Gulf of Mexico, projections indicate that SLR will be about 25% greater than the global average. This means that it is critical as we consider and plan for SLR we are using locally relevant information about how much seas have risen and how much they are projected to rise for our specific location. This presentation will walk users through how to find projected rates of SLR for their city or county using a recently updated resources: www.LocalSLR.org.

Sea-level rise (SLR) projections have a wide range, in some locations projecting anywhere from 2 to 11 feet of SLR. This range exists due to natural variability, uncertainty in carbon emissions, and continually improving ice sheet melt science. This range can make it difficult for planners and project managers who are balancing a complex set of needs, goals, and capacities to chart a sensible pathway to resilience. Fortunately, not all SLR scenarios are equally as likely, providing power to planners. In this presentation I will quickly go over how to use risk tolerance, the exceedance probability associated with SLR scenarios, and project design life to narrow down the range of scenarios to a specific planning range.

Even after the range of sea-level rise (SLR) projections have been narrowed down to a planning scenario, it still requires translating the scenario into information that can be used to understand future conditions. For example, if a project for a new bridge design has a planning range of 3 ft of sea-level rise over the next 40 years, this still does not provide information that can be used in the bridge planning. The engineers, project manager, and planners need to translate the planning range (3 ft of sea-level rise) into useful information about the conditions to which the bridge will be subjected. Currently, in coastal MS and AL there are resources for understanding future high-tide and changes in storm surge. This information can be used to assess low lying areas, infrastructure that may be at risk, provide building guidance, etc. In this presentation, three different resources will be used to provide examples for translating sea-level rise scenarios into an understanding of future conditions – the NOAA SLR Viewer, the EESLR Storm Surge Story Map, and the Alabama Coastal Comprehensive Plan Story Map. The presentation will close with a brief review of how the information from these resources can be used in planning.

GeoCoast is an interactive, web-based tool that allows for the simulation of coastal flooding and sea level rise along the Mississippi Coast. GeoCoast is publicly accessible and allows users to visualize sea level rise impacts in both two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) environments. In each of the viewers users can identify the impacts of sea level rise on critical infrastructure, such as government and medical facilities. GeoCoast has traffic routing capabilities allowing users to view these impacts on local road networks for various, user-defined, inundation levels. The base inundation simulation in GeoCoast uses a simple linear superposition model built on QL2 lidar data collected in 2015. This base model allows users to visualize water depth across the landscape (up to 15 feet) with a simple map slider. Additionally, data layers for buildings and roadways are visualized by depth of inundation based on the selected water depth. Other data sources for flood simulation include NOAA’s sea level rise data from the Digital Coast and storm surge/flooding from ADCIRC model runs. The ADCIRC runs include hind cast data for hurricane Katrina and other significant tropical systems affecting the northern Gulf of Mexico. Current efforts are focused on expanding data simulations to include results from the Effects of Sea Level Rise in the northern Gulf of Mexico project, as well as the geography to include other areas of the northern Gulf Coast.

As living shorelines become more well-known as an alternative to shoreline armoring, the need to explain the benefits of and what living shorelines are is replaced by questions about design, permitting, and costs. To answer these questions, the Green Infrastructure Working Group (GIWG) – a sub-group of the Gulf of Mexico Climate & Resilience Community of Practice – gathered 34 environmental professionals from across the five Gulf States. Quickly, it became evident that rather than creating a new living shoreline resource, it would be more productive to gather the already existing resources in one place. The GIWG compiled these resources into an extensive repository. Next, the repository was divided into topic areas and presented at a series of workshops across the five states. At these workshops, end-users were able to give input on missing information, draft formatting, and more. Following the workshops, five state-specific living shoreline resource catalogs were created for Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Because these resource catalogs are somewhat technical, the GIWG also created audience-specific, living shoreline two-pagers and videos. The two-pagers include frequently asked questions with answers and links to resources for more information. The short videos feature descriptions of living shorelines, testimonials from end-users, and descriptions of the state-specific living shoreline catalogs. These three resources can be used by a variety of audiences and serve as a one-stop shop for living shoreline information, reducing the need to scour the internet for resources and instead jump into exploring them. The state-specific living shoreline resource catalogs, audience-specific living shoreline two-pagers, and the three audience-specific videos can all be found at www.GulfLivingShorelines.com.

Urban development contributes to alterations in the thermal regime of a watershed. Stormwater exiting urban heat islands results in thermal pollution, and may alter the ecological integrity of receiving waters. This poster reports on assessing Low Impact Development (LID) stormwater control measure impacts on the thermal characteristics of stormwater runoff in a controlled laboratory setting. Findings show that LID stormwater control measures (SCMs) such as pervious surfaces and rain gardens/bioretention can contribute in mitigating thermal loads from stormwater runoff. This laboratory study captured and infiltrated simulated stormwater runoff form four infrared heated microcosms (pervious concrete, impervious concrete, permeable concrete pavers, and turf grass), and sent the stormwater runoff through rain garden microcosms. A data logging system with thermistors located on, within and outside the microcosms was used to record stormwater runoff temperature change. The importance of this research helps established a baseline of data to study heat the removal effectiveness of LID SCMs when used alone or in a treatment train.

For the past five years, Gulf of Mexico states have dealt with nearly annual appearances of massive Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) that have impacted coastal ecosystems and dependent tourism, fishing and the larger economies of communities. The research objectives of this project focused on quantifying the linkages between economic outcomes and Gulf of Mexico coastal health, specifically HABs. Results from the project were intended to enable coastal natural resource managers and their state and federal partners to quantify the economic implications for HABs (and their avoidance), and thereby assess options for restoration investment or management action. The tools developed in this project estimated economic impacts as measured by revenues, employment, wages and property values – all values that the public and official can understand. An important discovery was the critical linkage between social media metrics and economic impacts – as opposed to an assumed relationship between scientific data (in this case, HAB cell counts) and economic effects, which for the Florida Gulf Coast was weak or non-existent. To our knowledge, this was the first work to link economic impacts relating to Harmful Algal Blooms to social media activity. An online dashboard was developed and published which allows users to assess the economic impacts across time (monthly during the 2017-2019 event), geography (county, market region and state levels) and type (tourism, fishing, property values, etc.). The dashboard was designed to use publicly available data and thereby able to be replicated and transferrable to other Gulf States.