The daily likelihood of High Tide Flooding (HTF) predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for leads up to one year is expressed as the sum of a long-term trend, tides, and nontidal residuals (NTRs) whose probability density functions (PDFs) are assumed to be Gaussian (i.e., normally distributed). We analyzed observed detrended hourly NTR distributions at 148 NOAA tide gauges along the U.S. coastl...

Forecasting seasonal sea levels along many coasts remains challenging, with generally lower skills than forecasts for the open oceans. We investigate the influence of ocean dynamics on forecasting monthly sea level anomalies for the United States Gulf Coast and East Coast using the Estimating Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) system, which is initialized monthly from 1992 through 2017 and runs forward for 12 months u...

Rip currents present a significant safety risk to beach tourists and coastal communities, resulting in hundreds of annual drownings all over the world. A key contributing factor to this danger is the lack of awareness among beachgoers about recognizing and avoiding these rip currents. In response to this issue, we introduce RipFinder, a mobile app equipped with machine learning (ML) models trained to detect two types of rip cu...

Climate classification is a commonly used tool to simplify, visualize and make sense of an otherwise unwieldy amount of climate data in applied climate science research. Typically, these classifications have stemmed from one of two perspectives, either a circulation‐to‐environment (C2E) approach, or an environment‐to‐circulation approach (E2C), each with advantages and drawbacks. This research discusses a novel environment‐to‐...

Coastal water level information is crucial for understanding flood occurrences and changing risks. Here, we validate the preliminary version (0.9) of NOAA’s Coastal Ocean Reanalysis (CORA), which is a 43-year reanalysis (1979–2021) of hourly coastal water levels for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean (i.e., the Gulf and East Coast region, or GEC). CORA-GEC v0.9 was conducted by the Renaissance Computing Institute using the...

Realistic representation of monthly sea level anomalies in coastal regions has been a challenge for global ocean reanalyses. This is especially the case in coastal regions where sea levels are influenced by western boundary currents such as near the U.S. Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. For these regions, most ocean reanalyses compare poorly to observations. Problems in reanalyses include errors in data assimilation and...

Sea level rise is increasing the frequency of high tide flooding in coastal communities across the United States. Although the occurrence and severity of high-tide flooding will continue to increase, skillful prediction of high tide flooding on monthly-to-annual time horizons is lacking in most regions. Here, we present an approach to predict the daily likelihood of high tide flooding at coastal locations throughout the U.S. u...