Digital Coast

Issue

Residents of coastal Mississippi are familiar with coastal hazards and know they live in an area vulnerable to flooding. Their challenge is to predict the future impacts of storms and flood events and make wise development choices to increase resilience. Looking to the future, sea level rise is an important consideration, and most people living along the coast do not know how their community would fare if sea level were to rise 1, 2 or even 6 feet.

Process

The Coastal Hazards Outreach Strategy Team, in collaboration with the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant, set up a hazards exhibit at the Edgewater Mall in Biloxi, Mississippi, to help local residents and floodplain managers get a sense of what their town and neighborhoods could experience at various sea level rise scenarios. Potential flooding impacts were demonstrated using the Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts Viewer on a large screen at the exhibit. Using the Web-based tool, people were able to visualize the extent of flooding and zoom in to local landmarks to see a simulation of flooding under various degrees of sea level rise.

Impact

The ability to see the potential impacts from sea level rise proved to be a powerful tool for those who attended the exhibit. Twelve local coastal managers and many community members gathered to discuss the visualizations and wanted to zoom in to their own neighborhoods to see the impacts with varying amounts of sea level rise. Many of the floodplain managers were previously unaware of the tool and were eager to learn more about it to use it in their own work.

Rick Stickler, floodplain manager with the city of Biloxi, looks at potential flooding impacts along the coast of Mississippi using the Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts Viewer at the Edgewater Mall in Biloxi.