Katherine Anarde

In August 2012, a new terminal groin permit associated with the new Basnight Bridge was signed. As with the original (1989) Oregon Inlet Terminal Groin permit, the new permit requires NC DOT to monitor the adjacent beach in order to determine whether or not there is adverse impact of the presence of the terminal groin, including a determination of whether sediment loss is greater than that predicted by the historical rates. In addition, NC DOT has proposed coastal and biological monitoring in support of the NC 12 Transportation Management Plan (NC 12 TMP) alternative (as discussed in the B-2500 ROD) and a review of the historical rate used for a basis comparison. The monitoring associated with the NC 12 TMP is needed in order to determine the location and extent of future phases of the B-2500 project. This study will gather and analyze the data that is needed to satisfy the requirements of both 1) the new terminal groin permit and 2) the coastal monitoring program component of the NC 12 TMP. The present proposal includes the following program elements: 1) data collection by NC DOT, 2) monitoring of the existing Oregon Inlet terminal groin, 3) mapping and modeling of coastal habitat changes, 4) TMP coastal monitoring, including development of vulnerability indicators related to the island morphology, and 5) integration of physical and biological monitoring data from NC DOT with the morphological indicators. An annual report will be developed detailing the program tasks and annual results, including a comparison with baseline conditions.

Climate induced sea-level rise (SLR) is increasing coastal flood exposure globally, with tens of millions of people at risk to coastal flooding in the United States alone. In densely populated coastal areas, flooding outside of extreme events has been increasingly well documented, both scientifically and by the general public. Factors that contribute to these floods ??? atop local SLR ??? can include tides, wind, precipitation, groundwater, and faulty infrastructure. Within urban settings, chronic floods disrupt businesses, commute times, public utilities, and stress ecosystems, but our knowledge of the spatial extent and frequency of these floods is limited. This is largely because flooding outside of extreme events is hyperlocal, sometimes affecting one residential block at a time, but also because we rely on data from sparse tide gauges as a proxy for flood frequency. Given that water levels can vary substantially over small geographies due to environmental and human factors, the applicability of tide-gauge based proxies for assessing flood risk is geographically limited. Of equal importance: tide gauges are often located in populated, urban coastal settings. Here we ask: is flood risk underestimated in marginalized, rural coastal communities due to a lack of flood detection and sparseness of tide gauges? And to a larger extent, is flood risk underestimated in all coastal communities due to a reliance on tide-gauge based flood proxies? Anecdotal evidence in coastal North Carolina (NC) communities suggest that flooding is more frequent than predicted by flood proxies. Here we propose to provide new observations of flood extent and frequency in marginalized communities distant from tide gauges to support community-based understanding of flood risk. Specifically, we will integrate NASA???s higher spatial and temporal resolution satellite observations with in situ data streams to identify flooding in these communities. We are leveraging newly developed water level sensors and smart (with on-device machine learning) cameras, efforts led by PIs Anarde, Hino, and Goldstein. These sensors offer a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of satellite observations (e.g., Sentinel-1 and upcoming NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) and commercial SmallSat sensors (e.g., PlanetScope and Capella) in capturing flood extent at high resolution across various coastal landscapes, while also providing real-time, privacy-preserving data streams of flood hazards for partner communities. Through partnerships with local community groups, we will disseminate maps, real-time data streams, and sensor-based estimates of flood frequency at a community level to support local governments in demonstrating potential inequities and quantifying flood exposure as they seek funding for climate adaptation. As part of the final proposal, these community partners will be included as co-funded investigators. These data products will also be integrated into an existing project led by Co-I Hino that is combining measures of flood frequency with data from household surveys to evaluate how migration intentions relate to experience with chronic flooding in marginalized communities across coastal NC (New Bern, Down East, and Swanquarter). Our research design integrates earth scientists, social scientists, and community end users as project investigators. The earth scientists on this project have the collective expertise (from multiple sub-disciplines) to advance remote sensing techniques for flood identification (Co-I Wang) and integrate this data with in situ data products (PI Anarde and Co-I Goldstein). Co-I Hino is a social scientist with expertise in the human impacts of chronic floods; she will link the flood data produced as part of this project with human data on migration intentions and behavior. The results of this project will directly address climate justice issues in coastal communities that are underserved by existing observational networks.

Roadway vulnerability assessments are often used to predict which routes are currently, or may in the future, be subject to natural hazards. However, these assessments are often conducted for individual roadways and therefore do not assess to what degree road closures affect the connectivity of road networks ??? i.e., the ability for a user to access other roads in the network. A consequence of this is that future roadway retrofits, such as raising the elevation of roadways, could alter network connectivity in a way that has cascading impacts on community accessibility during extreme events. The principal goal of this project is to improve predictions of roadway vulnerability by using network science and network analysis to understand the connectivity of road networks during extreme events. By treating road intersections as ???nodes??? and road segments as ???edges???, we can successively remove nodes based on some criteria (such as increasing elevations, akin to flooding or another extreme event) to identify the threshold where the entire network starts to break apart. The network analysis proposed in this project is focused on coastal settings, and specifically flood hazards, but the methodology is broadly applicable to other regions of North Carolina and additional natural hazards (e.g., landslides).

This project will address the problem of recurrent, shallow flooding in low-lying coastal communities. As local sea-level rise (SLR), land subsidence, and heavy rainfall events increase, so does the frequency of flooding in low-lying coastal areas. The tidal cycle now takes place on higher average sea levels, resulting in ????????????????sunny-day??????????????? flooding of roadways during high tides. Sea water also infiltrates stormwater drainage systems at low tidal levels, such that ordinary rainstorms lead to flooding. While these minor floods draw less attention than catastrophic storms, their high frequency imposes a chronic stress on coastal communities and economies by disrupting critical infrastructure services. The proposed work integrates outreach and research activities over the two-year project period to improve our prediction and communication of chronic flood hazards. First, we will couple an existing high-resolution hydrodynamic model used for prediction of estuarine flooding in the region (SWAN+ADCIRC) with a stormwater management model (SWMM5) to hindcast and identify the drivers of unexpected flood events in Carolina Beach, a community plagued by chronic flooding. In parallel, we will co-develop potential flood-mitigation actions with Carolina Beach??????????????????s Flood Working Group to inform future work using the coupled model framework. Second, we will deploy a real-time flood sensor network (in development by PIs Anarde, Hino, and Gold) in Carolina Beach to fill data gaps on the incidence and causes of chronic flooding. These data will inform an early-warning system, designed with local officials and community members, for real-time communication of flood hazard.

The following SOW prepared for Moffatt & Nichol, on behalf of the Town of Oak Island, consists of a single task focused on characterizing the hydrodynamics of potential borrow areas on Frying Pan Shoals (FPS). This task complements and expands upon activities included in the BOEM-sponsored monitoring project of FPS led by UNCW, of which PI Anarde is a Co-PI.

The State Climate Office of North Carolina (SCO) will develop a suite of downscaled climate projections, defined below, along with accompanying descriptions and an Application Programming Interface (API) to enable the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR) to import the data into a state website for public access. The SCO will also provide a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to facilitate future data updates

The goal of the Early Career Research Fellowship ??? Environmental Protection and Stewardship track is to advance scientific knowledge and its application to predict and prepare for ecosystem changes in the Gulf of Mexico and its coastal zones as the region navigates a changing climate and energy transition.

This project will integrate physical, social, and economic data on flood risk and community preferences to support place-based decision-making for climate change adaptation in four coastal communities across North Carolina and Hawai??i. Building on existing NOAA CAP/RISA projects and partnerships, we will engage with community partners to develop a collective understanding of present and future flood risks and identify adaptation measures that meet local priorities for enhancing climate resilience. The four communities engaged in this project are Down East (from Harkers Island north to Cedar Island in Carteret County) and Carolina Beach in North Carolina and the North Shore of O??ahu (including Sunset Beach south to Waialua) and Windward O???ahu (including He??eia north to Ka??a??awa) in Hawai??i. The communities are already coping with recurrent flood impacts and face urgent adaptation needs. However, they differ in important ways that make this cross-CAP collaboration especially valuable. The drivers of flood risk (tides, rainfall, high wave events, tropical cyclones) differ significantly across geographies, and they differ in their cultural heritage and socioeconomic characteristics, which may lead to very different adaptation priorities. This project will allow us to test the transferability of this adaptation framework across such diverse communities and to demonstrate the importance of incorporating community values into the decision-making process.

In this study, we will measure fecally-associated bacteria in tidal floodwaters across two NC coastal communities of differing characteristics (e.g., rural versus urban, predominantly on-site/septic vs. off-site/centralized wastewater treatment). Goals of this study include documenting the prevalence of flood-driven contamination by rising sea-levels and identifying high-risk communities with likely exposure to hazardous water quality during sunny-day floods. Sites will be selected to coincide with areas where Co-PI Anarde???s team has installed monitoring systems for documenting hyper-local tidal flooding, which will allow us to compare water quality parameters with the incidence, drivers, and spatial extent of these floods.

This project will integrate seasonal hydrographic surveys performed by jetski along the inner shelf of Frying Pan Shoals with the portfolio of oceanographic surveys detailed in the original ???Fish Fry: Frying Pan Shoals Ecosystem??? proposal, led by the University of North Carolina ??? Wilmington (UNCW). The jetski hydrographic surveying system owned and maintained by PI Anarde ??? which consists of a jetski-mounted acoustic doppler current profiler (ADCP), real-time kinematic GPS system, onboard cappuccino PC, and visualization touch screen ??? allows for mapping of current velocities throughout the water column in very shallow water (<30 m). Through a fifth acoustic beam, the ADCP can also perform bottom tracking and there provide an indication of bottom morphologies. Here, we will use the jetski hydrographic surveying system to characterize the hydrodynamic and morphological conditions adjacent to the shoals on the inner shelf, in areas that cannot be accessed by larger surveying vessels. These surveys will support the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in decision-making related to future harvesting of sand from the shoals.

This project will provide new empirical insight regarding if and how coastal flooding influences migration decisions and community composition. We adopt an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the causes and consequences of chronic coastal flooding. Our research addresses two key knowledge gaps. First, we will deploy a novel, low-cost sensor system that will enable us to detect flooding where people live (rather than at tide gauges), at high temporal resolution. This approach ensures that we capture both ????????????????flash??????????????? and prolonged flood events, and the numerous drivers that contribute to them including rain, wind, groundwater, and local drainage infrastructure. Second, we will go beyond studying infrastructure impairment to investigate how people and communities experience and respond to chronic flooding through household surveys and large-scale administrative data.

Low-lying coastlines, like the North Carolina (NC) coast, will look vastly different within decades. There is a need to develop new ways for communities and stakeholders to evaluate the effects of near-term decisions on the long-term resilience of communities and ecosystems. We propose to use a barrier island model (Reeves et al., 2021, 2022; Anarde et al.,in review) and to adapt participatory modeling and deliberative dialogue approaches and use the best practices for co-producing decision-relevant science, to co-create a process and tools that will support adaptation planning. This project will directly benefit Cape Hatteras National Seashore (CHNS) and surrounding communities by providing assessments of the likely long-term, decadal-scale effects of mitigation and adaptation strategies on the barrier island landscape (i.e., island width, elevation, shoreline position, frequency of roadway and back-barrier flooding, and rates of change) under different future storminess and sea-level rise conditions. In addition, the co-creation process and the range of scenario assessments considered, will allow us to test hypotheses derived from fundamental science questions, thereby advancing our understanding of the interactions between management decisions and natural processes and benefitting the broader NC coast and barrier coastlines globally. This project will support CHNS, NCDOT, and Ocracoke, as they work to select from among the management strategies under consideration, plan future capital investments, and identify threats to critical infrastructure, such as Highway 12.

Microbiological contaminants will be screened in floodwaters during high tide floods in Beaufort and Carolina Beach, NC.