After Hurricane Sandy: How USGS Science Is Helping the Northeast Coast Prepare

Mantoloking, New Jersey, after Hurricane Sandy. Karen Morgan, USGS.

Hurricane Sandy did unprecedented damage along some of the most crowded coasts in the United States. To guide recovery and make the Northeast more resilient to the next storm, the USGS received $43.2 million in supplemental funding from the Department of the Interior and set out a science plan covering five areas.

1. Elevation: the root of vulnerability

A central lesson of Sandy: vulnerability is mostly a matter of elevation — how high homes, roads and habitats sit relative to tides, surge, waves and floodwater.

• A seamless coastal map: the USGS is building a Coastal National Elevation Dataset (CoNED) that merges land topography with seafloor bathymetry across the storm's impact region, for recovery, restoration design, surge and flood forecasting, and planning for sea-level rise.
• New lidar: aircraft-mounted lidar surveys of coastal and inland areas, chosen by damage and by the age of existing data, feed The National Map and the 3D Elevation Program. With NOAA and the Army Corps of Engineers, the USGS is updating East Coast maps and nautical charts.

Setting up a GPS base station at Montauk, New York, to collect "ground truth" elevations for CoNED. USGS.

2. Beaches and barrier islands

Beaches and barrier islands are the first line of defense for coastal communities and ecosystems. The USGS maps storm damage, models how coasts respond, and runs a national program that forecasts beach vulnerability to storms — updated with post-Sandy surveys. Research at Fire Island and Jamaica Bay (New York), the Delmarva Peninsula and Barnegat Bay (New Jersey) treats beaches, wetlands, dunes and back-barrier estuaries as one system. USGS forecasts before Sandy correctly predicted inundation at Fire Island and the spot where the island was breached.

Deploying buoys and instruments near Fire Island to measure waves and weather. Sandy Baldwin, USGS.

3. Storm tides and waves

For decades the USGS has measured surge on land and in shallow waters, beyond the reach of NOAA's ocean tide gages. But its network was sparse, and sensors were rushed to sites chosen on the fly before each storm — slowing deployment and delaying data, since each new site had to be surveyed to a common elevation.

The answer is the Surge, Wave, and Tide Hydrodynamics (SWaTH) network from Virginia to Maine:

A rapid deployment gage on the Pettaquamscutt River, Narragansett, Rhode Island. Andrew Waite, USGS.

4. Contaminants

Surge and floods can stir up polluted sediments and release chemicals and microbes from sewer overflows, wrecked buildings, cars and boats, gas stations, landfills, chemical storage and hazardous-waste sites.

Oily debris in Sheepshead Bay, New York, after Sandy. Jonathan Lally, U.S. Coast Guard.

• The USGS is testing sediment and fish and shellfish tissue in New York and New Jersey for storm-related contaminants trapped in estuaries and harbors, to find sources, pathways and high-risk areas.
• It is studying how people could be exposed — through soils, eating contaminated fish, dredge spoils or damaged infrastructure.
• Contaminant monitoring sites will be placed alongside SWaTH and marsh-elevation sites, and EPA networks, so storm-driven releases can be tracked and forecast.

Examining bed sediment from Great South Bay, New York. Irene Fisher, USGS.

5. Ecosystems and wildlife

Sandy struck about 30 National Wildlife Refuges and 6 national parks and seashores that shelter migrating waterfowl and endangered species, and serve millions of visitors from Boston to Washington.

Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, New Jersey, a stopover for migrating birds on a crowded coast. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

• Wetlands: radar, lidar, Landsat and aerial photos document damage to marshes and wetland forests; Surface Elevation Tables track fine changes in marsh height.
• Birds: studies of secretive marsh and shore birds, radar records of migration before and after the storm, and changes to stopover habitat and food.
• Forests: how forest type and size buffer the coast, and maps to guide recovery and restoration.

Reading a Rod Surface Elevation Table in a Jamaica Bay salt marsh. Don Cahoon, USGS.

Getting the data out

Data and tools reach users through The National Map, the Hazards Data Distribution System, NOAA's Digital Coast, Data.gov and FEMA. A successor to the Hurricane Sandy Storm Tide Mapper will give emergency managers real-time surge data. The Army Corps uses USGS work to find offshore sand for beach nourishment; the Fish and Wildlife Service uses it to map new piping plover nesting habitat.

Sources

Based on "Using science to strengthen our Nation's resilience to tomorrow's challenges: understanding and preparing for coastal impacts," U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2014–3062, following the USGS Hurricane Sandy science plan (Buxton and others, 2013); a work of the United States government in the public domain. Photographs are taken from the fact sheet's PDF. Its forecast and sensor-network maps, on Esri base maps, and a piping plover photograph used with a photographer's permission are not reproduced.