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
Fax: (703) 993-1633
https://volgenau.gmu.edu/profile/view/10248