Hurricane storm surge and wave attenuation by wetlands and coastal 
marshes: Towards a new paradigm for nature based coastal resilience

Friday, November 10th, 2017 at 10:00am
Johnson Center, Room A

Dr. Celso Ferreira
Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental and 
Infrastructure Engineering,
George Mason University

Flooding due to extreme events is one of the most deadly and costly 
natural hazards around the world. The 2017 Hurricane Season demonstrated 
the vulnerability of the United States to extreme events, causing wide 
spread damage and highlighting the need for resilient coastal defenses. 
Building with nature has offered a paradigm shift in engineering by 
providing a new design philosophy where the dependence upon hard 
engineering structures (e.g., levees and seawalls) to provide coastal 
protection is giving way to hybridized solutions incorporating natural 
and nature-based features (NNBF) for coastal resilience. Nature-based 
defenses for coastal resilience are increasingly gaining popularity as 
an ecological engineering approach to protect coastal communities 
against flooding and erosion. However, there remains a considerable gap 
in accurately determining whether coastal communities can safely and 
cost-effectively rely on NNBFs for community resilience against flooding 
under a changing climate.

In this talk, I will present an overview of our work in quantifying the 
hurricane storm surge and wave attenuation capacity by marshes and 
wetlands. The foundation of this work is based on one of the largest 
field datasets in the world documenting in-situ hurricane storm surge 
hydrodynamics and wave interactions with natural areas such as marshes 
during extreme events conditions. My research team has documented more 
than 50 storms in the last 3 years, including major Hurricanes such as 
Joaquim, Matthew and Hermine. I will present a new empirical formulation 
for wave dampening from natural areas and the practical engineering 
parameters for the implementation of natural and nature-based defenses 
for coastal protection. I will also present a numerical framework 
developed to predict protective services from the NNBFs under extreme 
weather events and the quantification of ecosystems services for flood 
protection. Finally, I will discuss future impacts of coastal storm 
surge and marsh migration to infrastructure in the Chesapeake Bay.

_Biography_: Dr. Celso Ferreira is an Assistant Professor in the Civil, 
Infrastructure and Environmental Engineering Department of George Mason 
University, specializing in water resources engineering. He is also an 
Associate Researcher at the USGS National Research Program. His current 
research interests are associated with water related extreme weather 
hazards and their impacts on civil engineering infrastructure. Dr. Celso 
Ferreira has authored over 20 technical publications and his research is 
currently funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the 
Department of Interior (DOI), the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation 
(NFWF) and several private organizations. He was recently appointed a 
Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. He has more than 10 years of 
experience working on consulting projects related to water resources, 
environmental and coastal engineering in the US and Brazil.

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Stephen G. Nash
Senior Associate Dean
Volgenau School of Engineering
George Mason University
Nguyen Engineering Building, Room 2500
Mailstop 5C8
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Phone: (703) 993-1505
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https://volgenau.gmu.edu/profile/view/10248