model — could be one way forward. By taking primarily economic criteria into account, a wide variety of other concerns citizens have, including those of far-away taxpayers and future generations, are left out. Therefore, additional criteria, whether environmental, cultural, or recreational, should be identified through reasonable public discussion. This would require not only more effective collaboration between federal, state, and local governments, but also the ceding of more decision-making power to citizens and civil society organizations. “By using a social choice model, the city would have a richer source of options and ideas to work with,” Boda said, “something that puts all available options on the table and requires that they be evaluated with a more comprehensive and long-term perspective.” Because social choice involves changing the way decisions of public concern are currently made, it is not likely to be justified by current government or economic calculations, according to Boda. This means While many Texans were bracing for Hurricane Harvey’s landfall in late August 2017, a team of researchers set out to deploy instrument pods along the Texas coast. The information gathered from these rapid- response units could help develop more resilient coastal communities by improving predictive models and tools. The Texas COAstal Storm Rapid Response team, known as COAS- TRR, comprises researchers from Texas A&M University’s campuses in College Station and Galveston as well as from Rice University in Houston. Jens Figlus, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering at Texas A&M, is the principal investigator on this project. The researchers are specifically looking for information to help them understand if storm impacts will erode the beach; scarp, overtop, or completely wipe out sand dunes; or if sediment deposits could re- quire expensive cleanup efforts. “When hurricane paths are forecast to hit a certain coastal area, it is im- portant to know ahead of time what the impact to the coastal morphol- ogy is,” Figlus said. “Our field measurements of hydrodynamics and sedimentation during and after hurricane impact allow us to improve those predictive models and tools so they can then be used by federal, state, and local agencies to issue notifications to the public, allocate resources, and plan for the appropriate response based on expected lo- cal conditions. Designing more resilient coastal communities Hurricane data can help predict how future storms may damage coasts.
civil society initiatives would need to provide the primary mechanism for achieving the needed change in practice. “There are many cases in U.S. history where civil society has played a crucial role in bringing about change. These institutions could be the drivers for new ways of collective decision making since we can no longer rely only on the market or formal government to offer solutions that will protect both our environment and our society in the face of rising seas and a changing climate,” Boda said. Download Boda’s dissertation, The Beach Beneath the Road: Sus- tainable coastal development beyond governance and economics, at http://portal.research.lu.se/ws/files/36216939/E_nailing_Chad.pdf.
Information provided by Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (www.lucsus.lu.se/home).
Currently, rapid-response field measurements of impacts to coastal systems from extreme storms such as Hurricane Harvey are difficult to collect. This is because of short notice preventing deployment of the instruments, potential of instrument failure or loss, and uncertainty of actual storm impact for specific locations. To address the dilemma, COASTRR is trying to link measurements of storm hydrodynamics across stretches of barrier island systems during storm impact with observations of coastal morphology change in the days and months following the storm. Infragravity waves The researchers are specifically interested in infragravity waves pro- duced by hurricanes and how these low-frequency water surface mo- tions affect coastal erosion and accretion patterns, as well as associated damages of these massive storms. “Infragravity waves are water waves within a specific frequency range between 0.04 and 0.003 Hertz,” Figlus said. “This means they have wave periods — the time between two consecutive wave crests passing the same location — between 25 and 333 seconds.” Similar to how the different frequencies of light waves from the sun can create different colors in a rainbow, water waves in specific fre- quency ranges hitting a coastline can have very specific effects on the coastline. “The observed effects of infragravity wave interactions with the coastal system has been exciting to explore,” Figlus said. “Being able to predict precisely which impact happens where and to what extent is the challenge that this research is helping to tackle.”
Information provided by Texas A&M University (www.tamu.edu).
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