New flood hazard products to support coastal climate adaptation planning in Humboldt County, California
Across the US, coastal communities face increasing threats from flooding, erosion, and rising groundwater tables due to accelerating sea-level rise and changing storm patterns. CoSMoS is a dynamic modeling approach that allows for detailed projections of coastal flooding due to both future sea level rise and storms. It is integrated with long-term coastal evolution (i.e., beach changes and cliff retreat) over large geographic areas (100s of kilometers). CoSMoS models all the relevant physics of a coastal storm (e.g., tides, waves, and storm surge), which are then scaled down to local flood projections for use in community-level coastal planning and decision-making.