The impacts of climate change in Rhode Island have become all too apparent. The state has seen stronger storms and heavier rainfall, and the need to plan for and respond to extreme weather events has become a top priority for many municipalities.
For the past decade, the University of Rhode Island has been developing a series of unique tools meant to help cities and towns do just that.
The Coastal Hazards Analysis Modeling and Prediction System (or CHAMP) is meant to give the people in charge of preparing for emergencies advanced data and modeling that can help them make decisions. StormTools provides up-to-date predictions on flooding.
Austin Becker, chair of URI’s Department of Marine Affairs, spoke with Ocean State Media’s Luis Hernandez about how these tools can help Rhode Islanders understand the impact of severe weather.
Interview highlights
On how these tools are used in real-time
Austin Becker: We’ve gone out in advance of the storm and collected data from pretty much every critical infrastructure facility along Rhode Island’s coast.
We’ve walked the site with those facility managers and located those specific things – the generators, the electrical transformers – and identified a threshold for flooding. And we’ve also logged with that facility manager what the consequences might be if that electrical transformer is flooded out.
We can take the forecast for flooding and the emergency managers can log right onto the dashboard and (see) all those points that we’ve identified, all those assets. If they’re predicted to exceed their flooding threshold, they light up in red and the emergency managers can click on those points, get a sense of what it is, why it matters, who the contact person is, right? So it helps connect the dots in these high-impact decision-making spaces and they’ve really got to parse through it quickly. This really points them to where these areas of concern might actually be.
On how ordinary Rhode Islanders might benefit from these tools
Becker: First of all, the tools are helping those emergency managers make decisions that protect everyday Rhode Islanders, and the planners are making decisions that make better use of our taxpayer dollars for reducing long-term risk.
And another tool that is part of this suite of tools called MyCoast. MyCoast is a tool that allows citizen scientists from the general public to document flooding that they see in their communities. So when there’s a king tide event or when there’s a major flooding event, people can go out and take pictures of those flooded roads, flooded parking lots, bridges, and upload them to the MyCoast app, and then that can give people a better sense of what flooding may look like in the future when we have more and more of these kinds of events.
On how Rhode Island town planners have used the information from these tools
Becker: In Wickford, there’s a parking lot that is very susceptible to flooding. The MyCoast app was used to show folks on a non-flooded day what that parking lot actually looked like in a major flood event. And as a result of the communications that came out of these tools, MyCoast and Storm Tools and CHAMP, the town was actually able to make some investments to elevate portions of that parking lot and get it out of the floodplain and alleviate that problem.
On what researchers have learned about changes to Rhode Island’s climate
Already since 1930, sea level is about 10 inches higher than it was. It’s projected to rise another foot to 1.5 feet by 2050.
We’ve seen that heavy rainfall events are 70% more intense than in the ‘50s. We’re seeing a lot more nuisance flooding, those “King Tide” events. We’re expecting these kinds of impacts to only increase over time. That’s something we certainly need to pay attention to here in the state.
Rhode Island is small, but we have one of the nation’s strongest coastal science communities, and these decision-support systems that we’ve built, they work because agencies and researchers are able to really work together in this state.
