Talking About Coastal Storms and Climate Change: Four Lessons From National Parks

Storm damage in January 2024 at Acadia National Park's historic Blue Duck Ships Store in Islesford, on Little Cranberry Island, Maine. Photo: NPS / Melissa Amuso.

Why how we tell it matters

Most people meet climate change through extreme weather. Along the U.S. East and Gulf coasts, scientists expect tropical storms and hurricanes to become more frequent and more intense. Forecasts for other coastal storms, such as nor'easters, are less certain, but the damage from all coastal storms is expected to grow as sea levels rise. Coastal parks are working to understand and prepare for these storms — and a vital part of that is sharing what they know with staff, visitors and neighbors. How to do that well is not always obvious.

In 2018, University of Rhode Island oceanographer Isaac Ginis and graduate student Deb Crowley began modeling future nor'easters and coastal flooding at Acadia National Park, the National Parks of Boston and Cape Cod National Seashore, publishing the results in the NPS Science Report Series in 2024. Science writer Catherine Schmitt worked with them and with staff at all three parks to turn the research into interpretive and educational programs. Drawing also on other parks' coastal adaptation case studies and vulnerability assessments, and on the research literature, the team settled on four practices.

A nor'easter over southern New England on December 17, 2020, seen by NOAA's GOES East satellite. Like hurricanes, which start in the tropics, nor'easters — born in the northern Atlantic — bring strong winds and big waves. Image: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Nor'easters Shape Our Changing Coastline. NPS film.

1. Make it local

People care most about extreme weather where they live. Nor'easters are a distinctly regional storm: like hurricanes they form in the North Atlantic and bring strong winds and large waves, usually with heavy rain or snow, and they can badly erode the coast — but the two differ in key ways. "Nor'easter" is more specific than "storm" and more local than "hurricane"; it belongs to the character of northeastern coastal parks and their towns.

• For residents, talking about nor'easters shows that the park shares local concerns, is itself affected by climate change, and is acting on it.
• For visitors from elsewhere, who may know hurricanes or other storms better, it opens a comparison of "their" storms with "ours" and a conversation about changing storm patterns in general.
• Sea level rise is local too. Its rate and size relative to the shore vary with topography, geography and sinking land. The team used the most local data available — for Acadia, the projections for the nearest tide gauge, at Bar Harbor.

2. Treat science as one way of knowing

Science is a process, not just a set of facts — and it is about the people who came to know those facts. There are other, no less valid ways of knowing the world: through livelihoods such as fishing, or through Indigenous relationships with land, water and sky. Presenting science this way turns a talk into a two-way conversation that respects everyone in it.

• Share science as it unfolds. Researchers usually talk at the start (the grant) or the end (the paper), but the best stories often lie in between. Big Egg Marsh, a salt marsh in New York City's Jamaica Bay within Gateway National Recreation Area, could vanish within decades as the sea rises; one story returns to its restoration 20 years on, when scientists came back to check, with audio, video and drawings from field notebooks.
• Talk about people. People like hearing about people, as park interpretive rangers know: their aim goes beyond summarizing a resource to explore the processes, people, values and relevance of science. A short film on the nor'easter project shows the scientists explaining their models to park staff.
• Be humble. Admitting uncertainty is something everyone can relate to. At Acadia, sea level rise proved confusing: many sources used different baselines and time spans. Things got easier after NOAA published the multi-agency 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report and the team kept to that one source. They still avoided words that sound certain about the future, such as "will." They also asked partners and visitors to critique 3-D visualizations of rising water at local sites, made by Penn State professor Peter Stempel from Ginis and Crowley's models. The deliberately imperfect full-color posters started conversations about favorite places, and viewers suggested marking landmarks such as schools and clearly labeling water height and projected year.
• Bring in other perspectives. The biggest uncertainty about climate change's future effects is human action, and other viewpoints widen the sense of what is possible. Kelsey Leonard, a member of the Shinnecock Nation and a professor at the University of Waterloo, has shown how common militarized language is in climate communication — often ineffective, and inappropriate for people who have lived with violence. She proposes replacing talk of loss and retreat with mending and unity, as others have too. Such perspectives can reveal unexpected solutions and foster optimism, which some link to more climate action.

3. Stay positive

Larry Perez, a communications coordinator for the NPS Climate Change Response Program, points to a large body of research favoring "hope versus doom" — the basis, he says, "for why we tend to favor redemptive framing." One hopeful message parks can always give is "we're taking action."

• Options themselves are hopeful. Park management is moving along a spectrum from resisting change to accepting it to directing it. Wherever a park sits, having choices counters stories of doom that breed helplessness. Adapting to rising seas rather than fighting them fits here: Boston, like many coastal cities, favors natural berms and floodable green spaces over concrete seawalls, and near the Charlestown Navy Yard it is raising a main street by two feet to protect more than 250 residents while building green space out from the shore.
• Living shorelines. Werowocomoco, an important Indigenous site on the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail in Virginia and the childhood home of Pocahontas, has lost several feet of shore to the rising sea. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science built a living shoreline there: plants hold the soil, and stones blunt the waves.

The living shoreline at Werowocomoco, built to stop erosion from rising seas. Photo: NPS.

• Change as nature, not only loss. After Hurricane Sandy struck Long Island in 2012, visitors saw a breach in the dunes at Fire Island National Seashore as a loss; scientists described it as a natural change built into a barrier beach. Storms damage ecosystems but also renew them — carrying sediment onto marshes, washing over dunes to refresh coastal lagoons, and toppling trees that become habitat and help hold the shore. And parks send a hopeful message simply by enduring: their landscapes may change, but the parks and their mission remain.

4. Invite participation

Citizen science, where the public helps with research, and community science, where groups help choose the questions and methods, put several of these practices to work at once: they respect other ways of knowing and offer something positive to do. Around coastal parks, residents and visitors photograph "king tides" and storm aftermaths to document rising water; at Acadia, those photos help check the flood models behind Stempel's visualizations.

Acadia National Park artist-in-residence Emilio Sweet-Coll working with visitors. Photo: NPS / Brady Richards.

• Participatory mapping tools, though imperfect, can gather crowd-sourced photos into shared stories of single floods.
• "Street-level" projects such as The Changing Cape draw on shared memories of past storms and invite people of different generations to ask "what if?" — helping parks tell scientific stories with more sensitivity to how climate change touches different people.
• Artists can be among a park's best allies in reaching a broad public. Visitors and residents can help artist Jennifer Steen Booher and the Mount Desert Island Historical Society with the Coast Lines project, which marks present and projected sea levels in towns around Acadia.

Making the time

Ginis and Crowley's research made room to rethink how parks talk about nor'easters and climate change. With park staff, the team identified research-based practices, reworked the data visualizations, and produced information answering the community's own questions. The result can help parks speak well about damaging winter storms of any size — and above all shows the need to work with communities and visitors, because when the next "record-breaking" storm comes, everyone is in the same boat.

The work was funded in part by NOAA's Effects of Sea Level Rise Program and the National Park Service.

Sources

Based on "Coastal Climate Messaging Essentials: It's All in the Telling," by Catherine Schmitt, Park Science 38, no. 1 (Summer 2024), National Park Service; published by the National Park Service and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The source's link on storm impacts worsening pointed to a private document and is not reproduced. The Park Service's film, lost when the page was imported, is restored from its page (2026-09-27).