Sea Level Rise Impact Assessment Tool – A Web-Based Application for Community Resilience in Coral Gables, Florida

Sea Level Rise (SLR) and storm surges are a threat to coastal communities in South Florida. Residents face the increased frequency of tidal flooding and associated economic losses. This paper presents a web-based SLR impact assessment tool that was developed for the City of Coral Gables, Florida. The tool is able to dynamically visualize the inundation extent of SLR scenarios between one and eight feet and the worst-case inundation caused by category one through five hurricanes. In addition, it reports statistics about the potential impacts of these inundation scenarios on population, property value, critical facilities, land use and the road network in any user-selected part of the city. The tool provides city managers and planners with information that can assist in the decision making process for investments in community resilience programs against SLR and storm surges. This paper describes the implementation of this tool, which is based on free and open source geospatial software (FOSS4G) and uses mostly open data components. It also provides an overview of the spatial data ecosystem related to coastal inundation (SLR and storm surges) in the United States. Whereas the functionality of the application was successfully demonstrated for one specific community in South Florida, the flexibility and dynamic nature of the developed application and the use of open source software and open data makes it suitable to support effective data-driven planning not only in the showcased area but in other coastal regions as well. Based on local data available for analysis, the application framework could be expanded as needed and include other topics (e.g. measure the effect of SLR for specific types of businesses) or utilize alternative inundation models (e.g. include hydrologic runoff analysis).