Scaling Up, Up, Up, with CSTORM and EWN

Welcome to the first episode of Season 4! Our theme is Up, Up, Up, with Nature-Based Solutions and we have a fabulous line-up of guests who are going to join us and talk about the climate change imperative – and the opportunity to collaborate on developing and implementing landscape-scale projects.   Host Sarah Thorne and Jeff King, Deputy Lead of the Engineering With Nature Program at the US Army Corps of Engineers, are joined by two guests. Amanda Tritinger is the Assistant Program Manager for the EWN Program, and a Research Hydraulics Engineer at the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Amanda is also a future cohost of the EWN Podcast. Matt Bilskie is Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia. Matt leads the http://coast.engr.uga.edu, a research team that develops computational hydrodynamic models to simulate astronomic tides, wind-waves, storm surge, and rainfall-runoff in coastal and oceanic environments. They are talking about how their work on innovative modeling will help project teams incorporate nature-based features into their coastal storm planning efforts.   Amanda and Matt met at the University of Central Florida and share a passion for applying math and science to make the world a better place by helping coastal communities thrive. As part of her education, Amanda used numerical models to predict erosion and accretion in marsh environments in a national estuarine research reserve. In the process, she fell in love with the coast, which led to her PhD and ultimately her work with USACE. Matt, a native Floridian, witnessed the devastation caused by the very active hurricane seasons of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Atlantic_hurricane_season and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Atlantic_hurricane_season early in his college days. This experience, along with his interest in computers and coding, led to his study of coastal storm surge and flooding.   Today, Amanda and Matt are actively involved in the https://n-ewn.org/ (N-EWN), a collaborative effort between USACE and the University of Georgia’s https://www.iris.uga.edu/. They’re excited about their work together using the https://www.erdc.usace.army.mil/Media/Fact-Sheets/Fact-Sheet-Article-View/Article/476697/coastal-storm-modeling-system/, or CSTORM.   CSTORM is a very robust tool developed by Dr. Chris Massey at USACE’s Engineering Research and Development Center that, in real time, couples storm surge and wave modeling. CSTORM can model different scenarios for storm timing, whether a storm hits at high or low tide; how strong the winds are; how fast the storm is moving; and different sea-level-rise conditions. As Amanda says, “Using CSTORM, we're able to look at historical storms, and synthetic storms. We can look at a thousand different storm scenarios before those storms are seen and predict what would happen during those given events, and we can look at role of natural infrastructure on our coastline. We're able to share those storms with our partners at University of Georgia and have them run them through their different setups and do scaling that Matt has been working on.”     An example schematic workflow for ERDC's CSTORM-MS. Source: ERDC CHL Fact Sheet.   Matt’s focus is scaling up this modeling to evaluate natural infrastructure features in both inland and coastal areas. He’s using CSTORM to run various scenarios: “We’re thinking about flood-plain reconnection, removing or moving levees back from the immediate vicinity of the riverbank. W