Landscape Hydrology Laboratory

HYDROLOGY + HUMANS

New 5-year project: Vulnerability of Coastal Infrastructure to Changes in Climate and Sea Level

jawitz@ufl.edu

Our new SERDP-funded project seeks to develop reduced-order frameworks to assess groundwater-related risks to coastal infrastructure from sea-level change.

Interested in applying to work on this project? Apply here.

The DoD has more than 1800 installations globally that are located within a 20-kilometer buffer zone from the shoreline and have potential inundation impacts from rising sea level, groundwater recharge, and coastal storm surge over the next century. Future changes in sea level and recharge are expected to increase saltwater intrusion into coastal aquifers (horizontal migration) and change water table elevations (vertical migration). The magnitudes of these changes depend on regionally variable drivers and boundary conditions, as well as spatially differentiated landscape physical properties. Thus, tools for supporting management need to appropriately consider these factors. We seek to address the following specific questions:

Q1: How do climate and landscape geophysical factors interact to determine groundwater responses to future sea-level change?
Q2: What local factors will determine the magnitudes and relative importance of specific components of the groundwater responses?
Q3: Which DoD sites are most vulnerable to sea-level changes, and what is the overall hierarchy of site vulnerability?

Figure 1. (A) Groundwater responses to changes in sea level, recharge, and river baseflow drainage. Important processes include marine inundation, horizontal migration of the saltwater interface (i.e., saltwater intrusion), and vertical changes of the water table and the saltwater interface elevations. (B) Our reduced-order model of a dynamic aquifer-ocean system, where the aquifer comprises two coupled reservoirs at hydraulic heads h1 and h2. Freshwater can be stored or released from the aquifer by vertical movement of the groundwater table and the saltwater interface. The system is forced by dynamic groundwater recharge, sea level, pumping, and river baseflow drainage elevation. System responses are mainly the elevations of the groundwater table and the saltwater interface, and freshwater and saltwater discharges between and out of the reservoirs.
Figure 2. Typology of geophysical setting, with example DoD installations. Left: coastal and estuarine. Right: inland with local drainage. Center: Attributes of both conditions.