The Coastal Hazards System (CHS) is a national-scale effort for quantification of coastal storm hazards along U.S. coastlines. Hazards from hurricanes and extratropical storms can include storm surge, waves, wind, rainfall, compound coastal-inland flooding, seiche, and extreme tides, among others. Climate change and sea level rise are also part of the scope. Accurate estimation of hurricane and extreme storm hazards is particularly challenging given that the occurrence of these events is sparse, both in time and space, and are not well represented in historical observation records. The CHS overcomes these limitations through its probabilistic coastal hazard analysis (PCHA) framework, which integrates: regional storm climatology characterization, development of synthetic storms, joint probability analysis of atmospheric forcing and hydrodynamic responses, dependence modeling of storm forcing parameters, high-resolution numerical modeling, machine learning storm hazard prediction, and quantification of associated aleatory and epistemic uncertainties.
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The CHS v2.0 offers modern visualization and a redesigned database to improve data storage and archiving, file structures, and metadata. The new web-tool provides an improved user interface and robust mapping capabilities for easy access, mining, plotting, and downloading of probabilistic and numerical model data for historical and synthetic coastal storms likely to impact U.S. coastlines. The system is also designed to facilitate data inter-operability with the Stochastic Storm Simulation (StormSim) suite of tools and the Coastal Hazards Rapid Prediction System (CHRPS) for accurate and efficient real-time prediction of hurricane hazards. CHS’ expanded capabilities provide consistent, reliable, and centralized access to essential coastal hazards data.
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The CHS directly supports a wide range of Federal, State and Local activities and complex processes, including: coastal storm risk management, flood risk management, planning and feasibility, economic analysis, stochastic engineering design, nature-based feature evaluation, real-time emergency management and operations, long-term risk and resilience assessment, and climate change adaptation