MRI: Development of a Shared-Use Experimental Platform to Study Wind, Hydrodynamic, and Biochemical Conditions in the Littoral Zone During Extreme Coastal Storms

This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award supports the development of an instrumentation platform to study wind, hydrodynamic, and biochemical conditions in coastal areas during hurricanes. State-of-the-art monitoring stations will be engineered for temporary installation to monitor extreme wind, storm surge, waves, beach erosion, and hazardous water quality conditions.

Reducing the loss of life and property from coastal hazards is a national imperative. The direct measurements of wind and water at landfall will help engineers design cost-effective storm-resilient communities. Data and video will be shared with researchers, operational groups, media outlets, commercial partners, and local response and recovery entities.

Broader impacts on training, outreach, and recruiting will be achieved through collaboration with the University of Florida’s NSF-sponsored Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Experimental Facility. NHERI coordinates a comprehensive K-12 teacher professional development training program covering engineering design, inquiry, and design thinking.

Content will be developed on landfalling hurricanes and the importance of building resilient coastlines by leveraging video, data, and analysis from this instrument.

The goal of this MRI is to fill in a longstanding observational gap at the coast as tropical cyclones (hurricanes) transition from water to land in the littoral zone — where coastal waters meet the land. The fleet of portable monitoring stations (called “Sentinels”) will be installed shortly before landfall to ensure ideal placement; will resist extreme wind, storm surge, and hydrodynamic loads; and will continuously transmit live, high-fidelity measurements and video feeds.

Sentinels will provide a versatile testbed to meet the diverse needs of researchers studying wind and hydrodynamic loading of coastal infrastructure, boundary layer meteorology, numerical weather prediction, air-sea interaction, remote sensing of surface wind and wave fields, storm surge and shallow wave behavior, coastal morphodynamics, biogeochemistry, among others. Numerous NSF-supported facilities and research projects will benefit from composite, synchronized datasets that quantify wind speed, water depth, wave height/direction, erosion, and changes in water quality associated with tropical cyclones.

The data will help produce a more complete climate record for extreme storms and accelerate research directed at improving the characterization of wind, storm surge, and wave impacts to civil/coastal infrastructure, prediction of impacts to the nearshore water-land system, water quality monitoring, and estimation of surface wind intensity through numerical weather prediction and remote sensing. Design, instrumentation selection, and deployment strategies will be guided by a multi-disciplinary advisory group consisting of experts in wind, coastal, and environmental engineering; ecology; atmospheric science; and oceanography.

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.