Advancing Prediction of Flooding, Morphological Change, and Damage from Hurricanes: The NOPP Hurricane Coastal Impacts Initiative

Hurricanes can cause devastating coastal impacts including flooding, erosion, and infrastructure damage. While operational forecasting systems skillfully predict regional storm surge, a capability gap remains in forecasting infrastructure-scale impacts from hurricanes – specifically localized breaching, building damage, and morphological change. The National Oceanographic Partnership Program Hurricane Coastal Impacts (NHCI) project brought together nine research teams over four years (2021–2024) to assess whether such predictions could be achieved in a forecasting framework. The project provided consistent atmospheric forcing to three independent coastal modeling systems (CoSMoS, COAWST, ADCIRC), deployed coordinated observations during six hurricanes, and evaluated predictions against ground truth. Outcomes from these coordinated efforts include high density observation datasets from offshore to onshore, accurate local flood depth predictions, simulation of the catastrophic breaching of Florida’s Sanibel Causeway islands using meteorological forecasts from two days before Hurricane Ian’s landfall, and estimates of building damage due to the storm. The project demonstrated a real-time forecasting framework for these impacts and the value of a multi-year collaborative effort enabling iterative improvement on observational strategies and model configurations necessary for a real-time workflow. We review both the demonstrated capabilities and investments that could advance infrastructure-scale coastal damage prediction from research demonstration toward operational application.