Proposals were sought for projects that would assess the currently available empirical, analytical, and numerical models that are used to obtain current and future coastal total water levels. Projects were needed that compared, contrasted, and identified strengths and shortcomings of current state of the art modeling used to support engineering planning and design needs for coastal installations. Assessment and analysis products should have included a review of available models methods that purported to produce coastal total water levels and project coastal total water levels into the future. As part of the assessment, the analyzed models should have been described in a manner to include the sources of information, cost of use both from a computer and fiscal resource perspective, and to have been characterized by use cases that would provide DoD engineers and planners an understanding of the ability of the various models to provide appropriate and authoritative information regarding foreseeable projected sea level change. Preference was given to projects that combined expert analysis with a decision support aid that clearly elucidated the various approaches, models, and tools available impartially so that decision-makers could appropriately select approaches that met a variety of needs from simple to complex, covering low to high consequence situations.

Information on how the various models incorporated changing sea level, an assessment of where particular models or approaches might have been more or less suitable regionally both within Continental United States the and outside the Continental Unites States, and model strengths and weaknesses should have also been included within the decision support aid. Proposals including a decision support aid should also have proposed how the decision aid would be demonstrated, identified no less than three and no more than five installations as demonstration sites, and proposed the metrics by which success of the decision aid would be measured. Proposed installations should have included both CONUS and OCONUS locations that represented a range of regions, complex environments, and resource constraints.

Funded projects will appear below as project overviews are posted to the website.

DoD faces a long-term threat from sea level rise (SLR) and increased flooding at coastal locations. Currently, DoD installations often use the DoD’s Regional Sea Level (DRSL) database for the integration of projected sea level rise into planning. This database provides authoritative, scenario driven, information based on the appropriate vertical datum (e.g., North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD88), Puerto Rico Vertical Datum of 2002 (PRVD02) to DoD installation managers and decision makers. Using this information, installation personnel may decide that more detailed analyses are necessary to assess local, specific vulnerabilities for a range of consequences. In doing so, they face a plethora of currently available empirical, analytical, and numerical models and approaches that vary widely in terms of complexity, computational cost, fiscal cost, and efficacy. This effort seeks to provide a comparative assessment of the many approaches, allowing the users to conduct phased assessments or scale the analyses to the consequences as appropriate, within the resources available.