Coastal Hazards System

The Coastal Hazards System (CHS) is a coastal storm response data resource. The focus of the product is distribution of regional coastal high-fidelity climatological and hydrodynamic modeling results and associated measurements including storm wind, atmospheric pressure, wave, surge, water level, currents, tropical cyclone parameters, statistics of the above processes, and any other pertinent data. The data files include peaks and time series. Tropical storm parameter time series include latitude and longitude of center, minimum central pressure, central pressure deficit, radius of maximum winds, wind speed, forward speed, heading, and land-falling location. Joint wave and water level statistics are provided. A primary CHS goal is to offer storm responses that span practical probabilities with average return intervals of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000 years provided. Epistemic uncertainties in the form of upper confidence limits of 84%, 90%, 95%, and 98% are also provided. Finally, relative probabilities are provided for tropical storms to allow sampling of storms in a life-cycle analysis. This information is generated within regional studies such as the FEMA Risk MAP program and USACE North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive Study. The high fidelity modeling conducted within these studies is produced in a statistical context that is useful for federal, state, and local coastal engineering and risk assessment projects. The comprehensive nature of these studies combined with the high level of computational and statistical analyses is a relatively recent development and the CHS is designed to make consumption of these data relatively simple in order to support probabilistic engineering and science studies.