Resilience Research Projects

Resilience Research in the Davidson Laboratory

The view from Manhattan of rising waters in the East River during Hurricane Sandy, 2012

Stevens’ Davidson Laboratory innovates the science serving this growing global urban population, applying its expertise in coastal ocean physics and forecasting to problems that affect the 20 million residents of the New York metropolitan area. Davidson Lab experts also create novel infrastructure and coastline rebuilding solutions, and assess the effectiveness of urban shore protection initiatives, beach erosion mitigation plans and zoning laws to prepare for future natural disasters.

For example, based on observation data retrieved from the Stevens Flood Advisory System (SFAS), Davidson Laboratory researchers recently won 1st place in the 29th Annual New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) GIS Mapping Contest in the category of Best Software Integration with a Flooding Map in Hoboken and downtown Jersey City during Hurricane Sandy. This work represents the culmination of ongoing efforts to visualize the flood, to demonstrate these critical conditions to the general public.

Map showing flood levels in Hoboken and downtown Jersey City at the peak of Hurricane Sandy

Research Projects

Davidson Laboratory resilience projects are discreet, actionable and designed to change the status quo. We solve real-world problems in critical infrastructure and urban systems in and around New York Harbor that attract the best minds, internationally, and whose solutions can be applied globally.

Understanding Hurricane Sandy’s Impacts: It Could Have Been Worse

What would have happened if Hurricane Sandy hit the NY/NJ area at a different time?

Hurricane Sandy resulted in devastating destruction in the NY/NJ metro area. Modeling by the CURES team was highlighted in NYC’s 2013 flood mitigation plan, showing that if the wind-blown storm surge had occurred 7-10 hours earlier—when the tide was high for all waterways in the region—the consequences would have been even more catastrophic, including inundation of the region’s central food distribution port facilities.

Flood Mitigation in Jamaica Bay

Municipalities across the nation are weighing the value of nature‐based flood mitigation strategies and the ecosystem services they provide, yet there is limited quantitative information available to help inform these decisions. In this study, we use hydrodynamic model‐based flood mapping and risk assessment to develop new nature‐based flood adaptation concepts, quantify their value, and map their flood protection services. A case study of Jamaica Bay, New York City (NYC) is utilized where the recent impacts of Hurricane Sandy have created strong public support for flood mitigation measures.

Forecasting: Precipitation-Driven Flooding in Urban Settings

This application for the City of Hoboken, NJ presents a novel flood prediction framework that operationally integrates existing predictive models representing meteorological (Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System, COAMPS), coastal (New York Harbor Observing and Prediction System, NYHOPS), hydrologic, street and underground hydraulic stormwater components (Storm Water Management Model, SWMM). The framework produces, within a 72-hour forecast horizon, on-the-fly Google Earth flood maps that provide critical information for decision makers and emergency preparedness managers. The work offers interesting perspectives for stormwater best management practices, water quality modeling and climate change scenarios.

From Facebook Photos to Hard Science: Real-Time, Crowd-sourced Flood Data in Hoboken

Together with Facebook and the City of Hoboken, Davidson Lab researchers have initiated a "citizen science project," contributing raw data in the form of public photographs and stories of extreme weather and flooding events to create maps of conditions as they occur in time with minimal latency. Via the Davidson Laboratory Facebook page, researchers will blend the crowd-sourced data with our forecasting models to come up with the best estimates for future events. With this cumulative data, we can improve our confidence in what various models show about the actual impacts of significant rainfalls and storm surges.

Collaborative Design and Dynamic Modeling for Urban Coastal Flood Adaptation

This analysis is a collaboration between scientists, engineers and planners, where flood mitigation plans have been developed and tested using dynamic water modeling, and visualizations have been created to illustrate impacts on the city’s landscape. Ten computer storm surge simulations were used to map the effect of projected sea level rise on 100-year flood zones and to show the water pathways that flooded Jersey City during 2012's Hurricane Sandy, all provided useful information for planning measures that can prevent flooding.

Interaction between a Shallow Tidal Creek and Marsh System

Analysis of in situ observations and dynamic modeling with a sub-meter scale numerical grid showed that the hydrodynamics of an interconnected, very shallow tidal creek and marsh system driven by far-field forcing dramatically altered by local processes. Influenced by the extremely shallow hydrography of the area and marsh hydrology, tidal truncation, tidal asymmetry, increased diurnal inequality and neap-spring residual asymmetric effects, differential advection, secondary circulation, local atmospheric heat fluxes, and local photosynthesis and respiration, lead to large cross-tidal variability for water levels and currents, and large spatial and temporal temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen fluctuations.

Urban Meteorology as Influenced by the Urban Ocean

Urban Coastal regions are rendered complex by abrupt topography, shallow bathymetry, irregular coastlines, corrugated cities, discharging rivers and by processes in the ocean and atmosphere spawned by these boundary features. The dynamics of continental boundary regions are characterized by rapid response times (on the order of hours) associated with, for example, sea breeze fronts in the atmosphere and upwelling fronts in the ocean. CURES scientists have accurately simulate surface land and ocean processes in the New York/ New Jersey (NY/NJ) area to better understand the atmospheric response to surface forcing. By utilizing a realistic high-resolution urbanized atmospheric model that responds to sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from a high-fidelity ocean model, this work seeks to illuminate aspects of the boundary layer (BL) response to localized upwelled water commonly occurring in summertime.

Engineering Resilience Through Coastal Landscape Restoration

Since 1992, New Jersey has implemented innovative ways of protecting coastlines and the valuable assets that lie just inshore. After Hurricane Sandy, researchers teamed with FEMA to identify the critical natural and constructed features which best protected New Jersey communities. With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), an extensive structural damage database was constructed for three heavily impacted communities. This database is currently being used in conjunction with advanced numerical storm erosion and data driven modeling techniques to evaluate the importance of landscape features to coastal resilience.

Rebuild By Design: Blue Dunes

The Davidson Lab has innovated several regional flood adaptation approaches involving landscape creation or restoration, including this Rebuild By Design finalist project that proposed creating an offshore barrier island chain centered on the New York Bight called “Blue Dunes”—blue indicating their position in the open ocean and dunes for the natural landforms they mimic.

Rebuild by Design: Blue Dunes

Engineering Resilience Through Living Shorelines

Living shorelines are shorelines that have been engineered in a way that allows them to protect the communities behind them, but also provide critical habitat to fragile coastal ecosystems. This is achieved through the integration of ecological and engineering concepts. Stevens has taken a leadership role in this field, drafting one of the first sets of engineering guidelines specifically for the northeast and becoming one of the first universities in the country to offer a class specifically focused on living shorelines.

Stevens has partnered with groups such as The Nature Conservancy, NY/NJ Bay Keeper, American Littoral Society, Rutgers, NJDEP, Barnegat Bay Partnership, and the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary to form the NJ Coastal Resilience Network. One of the significant achievements of the NJ Coastal Resilience Network is the development of an online decision support tool for communities based on the design guidelines developed at Stevens.

Resilience Tools

In support of the resilience projects several “Tools” have been created which facilitate innovative research.

Davidson Laboratory

For more than 80 years the Davidson Laboratory has been Stevens Institute of Technology's naval, marine, and coastal flood plain research laboratory. Today the professional research staff consists of 35 faculty and staff members and about 50 undergraduate and graduate students. The Laboratory operates in four primary areas: operational oceanography, hydrology and hydraulics, ocean engineering, and experimental marine hydrodynamics (ship design and evaluation). Davidson Laboratory houses a 313’ x 12’ x 6’ deep towing tank, with a dual flap programmable wave maker capable of generating 2’ foot waves. Researchers have tested dozens of shore protection structures in the tank, including beach dewatering, coastal revetments, and offshore breakwaters.

NYHOPS

Davidson Lab experts created and maintain the New York Harbor Observing and Prediction System (NYHOPS), a vital forecasting resource for emergency preparedness. NYHOPS, an Urban Ocean Observatory, provides a real-time assessment of ocean, weather, and environmental conditions throughout the waters of New York, New Jersey and Long Island Sound. This information is available to serve the maritime user community in the same way that atmospheric weather forecasting has delivered for on-land populations. Real-time observations and 48-hour predictions include water level, currents, waves, salinity, and temperature and a full suite of meteorological parameters. The technology uses real-time observations from an advanced, integrated system of fixed and mobile (from ferry and sightseeing vessels) oceanographic and meteorological sensors and a verified estuarine and coastal ocean forecasting model.

New York Harbor Observing and Prediction System (NYHOPS)

Stevens Flood Advisory System

The Davidson Lab maintains the Stevens Flood Advisory System (SFAS), a fully-automated, ensemble-based flood advisory system that dynamically integrates real-time observations and river and coastal flood models forced by an ensemble of meteorological models at various scales to produce and serve street scale flood forecasts over urban terrain during extreme rain events or storm surges. The SFAS is applied to the Greater NY/NJ Metropolitan region, and is used routinely by multiple forecast offices and departments within the US National Weather Service (NWS), regional and municipal Offices of Emergency Management, as well as by the general public.

Stevens Flood Advisory System

Stevens Data Center and Hyper-Scale Computing Center

CURES has direct and unlimited access to the Davidson Laboratory’s Hyper-Scale Computing Center located on campus and managed by the school’s Information Technology Office. There is a High Performance Computer (HPC) cluster designed and built with a high level of redundancy to support CURES. Currently, the HPC cluster consists of 70 general computing nodes, which contains 1448 cores, 2 head nodes, and 2.2 PB of Seagate CS6000 Lustre parallel file system.

The CS6000 storage system is built on RAID6 technology. All storage servers are configured in high availability (HA) pairs. The two head nodes also support redundancy. In an initiative currently underway, we are working with our technology partners to enhance the automatic failover process to further increase fault tolerance. The computer cluster incorporates fault tolerance as well by using the advanced MOAB management system. The cluster is connected with both FDR InfiniBand (IB) network and internal Giga Ethernet communication systems. The Ethernet switches are installed in pairs and the IB switches have built in redundancy within the network layer.

Beyond the hardware and OS redundancy, the HPC cluster is supported by our technology partners with a Silver-level support agreement, and Next Business Day hardware replacement of parts. This service delivery is through our technology partners HP and Seagate. Finally, Information Technology has two system administrators who manage and administer the HPC cluster, and who actively work to improve its function and capabilities.

Marine Operations

The Coastal Engineering Lab conducts high-resolution field investigations of shore protection projects including beach fill evolution, shoreline structure interaction, wave transformation, and sediment transport. Field research is supported by the Laboratory’s two research vessels and a jet ski based coastal bathymetric surveying system. In-situ wave and current measurements are obtained by the Center’s marine operations group which maintains and operates Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers, Water level gauges, wave meters, and acoustic Doppler velocimeters.

Davidson Laboratory researchers frequently conduct bathymetric and topographic surveys using the specially designed DUCKS surveying system. DUCKS integrates traditional RTK GPS measurements with acoustic sounding information using a computer system mounted on the back of a jet ski. The versatile system allows measurement of the bathymetry in extremely shallow areas, and in places like the surfzone where traditional measurement approaches fail.

Coastal Urban Resilience Research at the Davidson Laboratory

Join the prominent agencies and organizations that currently fund coastal urban resilience research in the Davidson Laboratory.

Port Authority of NY-NJ

For over 90 years, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) has kept the region's commuters, travelers and global shippers moving.

PANYNJ

New Jersey Transit

New Jersey Transit is the nation's third largest provider of bus, rail and light rail transit, linking major points in New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia.

New Jersey Transit

NJDEP

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is a national leader in preventing pollution and innovative environmental management strategies.

NJDEP

NOAA

The work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spans the surface of the sun to the depths of the ocean.

NOAA

National Park Service

Since 1916, the National Park Service has been entrusted with the care of our national parks.

National Park Service

Davidson Laboratory

Coastal Urban Resilience Research

Location On Campus

Davidson Laboratory
711 Hudson Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030

Contact Types

p. 201.216.5289
e. [email protected]

Social Media

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Department Leaders

Dr. Raju V. Datla Research Associate Professor

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Resilience Research in the Davidson Laboratory

Research Projects

Port Authority of NY-NJ

New Jersey Transit

NJDEP

NOAA

National Park Service

Coastal Urban Resilience Research

Location On Campus

Contact Types

Social Media

Department Leaders