The Department of Defense (DoD) has military assets on or near the coastline and in tidally influenced areas across the globe. These sites are increasingly exposed to flood risks from tropical cyclones, storm surge, and waves, with impacts exacerbated by rising sea levels. These natural hazards significantly degrade warfighter mission readiness by destroying critical DoD infrastructure, reducing soldier training days with undue stress on capabilities, and leave installations vulnerable to adversarial attacks.

The Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) funded the development of the DoD Regional Sea Level (DRSL) database and an associated technical report with its agency partners. These products supported DoD efforts to assess and respond to coastal infrastructure exposures and vulnerabilities from plausible scenarios of future mean sea level and extreme water levels.

The DRSL database, which was initially completed in 2016, provides regionalized sea-level change and extreme water level scenarios for three future time horizons (i.e., 2035, 2065, and 2100) for 1,774 DoD sites worldwide based on the Department’s real property inventory. Individual sites managed by DoD exhibit a cross-section of physical settings, exposure to natural hazards (e.g., sub-tropical storms and extra-tropical storms), infrastructure and mission importance, and data quality conditions. These factors present unique challenges for understanding current exposures and vulnerabilities and developing plausible scenarios of future conditions. Despite data limitations and uncertainties, the development of this database represented several advancements in scenario development and demonstrated a methodology for assessing exposures to risks in coastal environments.

For more information on the DRSL effort, please review the associated DoD Report on Regional Sea Level Scenarios for Coastal Risk Management.

The DRSL database is accessible through the DoD Extreme Conditions Assessment Tool (DECAT) and the DoD Resilience Tools websites.

For additional sources of publicly available sea level rise data and scenarios see related sea level rise research efforts below: