Coastal Flooding

This week we looked at coastal flooding through several projects focused on New Jersey and Southwest Florida. I was pretty excited to learn some of these techniques as this is something we consider in a lot of work I do on climate change impacts and cultural resources.

The first project involved comparing LiDAR data from pre- and post-Sandy on coastal New Jersey. We converted the point clouds into rasters and compared them to see how the storm affected the coastline. The result shows areas of erosion from the storm, including several areas where the ocean breached the island. 

The second portion of the assignment included calculating storm surge for Cape May County, NJ. This process involved using a DEM to find areas of elevation at 2 meters or lower and creating a polygon of this area. These areas represented where storm surge could flood the landscape. We had to do a simple math problem to figure what percentage of the county this area covered.

The last project was to calculate potential storm surge in Southwest Florida using both USGS and LiDAR derived DEMs. We used a similar process as in Cape May, selecting out pixels from a raster that were 1 meter or less and creating polygons for each data source. We used these polygons to select which buildings could be impacted by storm surge, comparing both methods to see how many structures were included in each model. The assignment assumed the LiDAR would be more accurate as it had a more nuanced representation of the landscape. It selected out less structures as it covered less area.