Third International Workshop on Waves, Storm Surges, and Coastal Hazards, Incorporating the Seventeenth (17th) International Waves Workshop; Notre Dame, Indiana; October 1-6, 2023

The International Workshop on Waves, Storm Surges and Coastal Hazards is a continuing series of international workshops on all aspects of ocean and coastal ocean waves, water levels and currents. Interrelated applications span from offshore energy infrastructure (wave and current forces against offshore oil/gas structures and wind turbines), navigation (waves and currents interacting with ships in open water, through inlets and into harbors), coastal floodplain inundation (due to hurricane storm surge, tsunamis and coastal riverine flooding), coastal morphology (sediment transport impacting the depth of navigation channels and estuarine/river to ocean exchanges), to coastal ecosystems including impacts on water quality, fauna and flora (e.g. community water supplies, industrial pollution, water temperature and salinity, algal blooms, fish larval exchanges, available oxygen in the water).

Understanding the underlying physics and enabling prediction through models is becoming increasingly important as world populations continue to grow and migrate to coastal areas and as global and regional ocean and atmospheric climatology change. These increasing coastal populations are drastically modifying the coastal ocean and floodplain through deforestation, land development, dredging, levee construction, and intensive aquaculture, fundamentally changing the wind wave, tide, storm surge and hydrologic response to a specific event.

In addition, anthropogenic induced global atmospheric and oceanic climatology change is driving more powerful and larger storms that are trending to move more slowly and producing more intense rainfall rates and larger total rainfall volumes.

The workshop’s topics include field observations, laboratory studies, theoretical foundations to improve physical process descriptions, model implementation from computational algorithms to code architecture, data assimilation, artificial intelligence, process interaction (wave/storm surge, ice/wave, ice/storm surge, hydrology/tide/surge), verification/validation/uncertainty quantification, and operational applications in short- and long-term forecasting and statistical hazard analysis. Specific topics in the wave arena include improved methods for wave prediction in complex conditions and environments, ocean wave climate and wave measurements, user requirements, best practices and evaluation to improve the physics of wave generation, extreme seas, wave generation in complex geometries, near-coast applications, and unique waves such as rogue waves, solitons, and infragravity waves.

Topics for the surge and coastal hazards arena include developing tools for quantifying future coastal and offshore risks and resiliency by predicting storms and storm effects associated with waves, currents, surges and other processes that affect communities in coastal areas. Coastal inundation forecasting from multiple sources is of particular interest.

Storm surge topics include operational forecasting; global and regional hindcasts; storm surge climatology; data collection and instrumentation; data assimilation into numerical models; wave-current interaction; surge-ice interaction; compound flooding; shallow water and nearshore effects; wind fields for wave hindcasting or forecasting: extremal analysis; case studies, past and future climate trends and variability.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.