Seminar: NOAA’s Coastal Ocean ReAnalysis (CORA): High Resolution Observation-based Mapping of inundation along US Coasts

Abstract

NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) maintains and operates NOAA's National Water Level Observation Network (NWLON), which provides real-time and historic water level observations at over 200 locations across U.S. coastlines. While very useful for many purposes, these observations are primarily representative of the conditions in the immediate vicinity of each station, creating gaps in data and product coverage between stations that can exceed 200 miles. CO-OPS is leading a community-based numerical modeling reanalysis of water levels to bridge discontinuities to provide this information to more coastal communities. NOAA’s Coastal Ocean ReAnalysis (CORA) is the result of a collaboration across the Federal government, academic institutions, and private industry and is becoming an important benchmark for coastal water level analysis and derived flood products. By assimilating long-term tide gauge water level observations from 1979 to 2022 with ADCIRC + SWAN hydrodynamic modeling, CORA supports efforts to consistently fill gaps in the coastal-ocean observation record and improve our understanding in coastal water level change across multiple timescales. Numerical solutions on CORA’s unstructured meshes are also interpolated onto a continuous geospatial grid with 500m resolution to simplify product development. Skill assessments for the Gulf, Atlantic, and Caribbean thus far show that CORA performs well compared to NWLON observations for single events, monthly means, tidal datums, and long term trends. This talk will provide background on CORA development and its uses, summarize model data assimilation and validation, and highlight subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) prediction of high tide flooding as an example application of using CORA data to enhance an existing NOAA product. We will also describe future planned efforts and ongoing opportunities for student and research engagement regarding CORA.