The International Workshop on Waves, Storm Surges and Coastal Hazards is a continuing series of international workshops on all aspects of ocean and coastal ocean waves, tides and storm surge including measurements, modeling, prediction on all time scales, and climate, from the basic research to the ultimate end user community. Applications today span from offshore infrastructure, navigation, coastal floodplain inundation, coastal morphology, to coastal ecosystems including impacts on water quality, fauna and flora. Understanding the underlying physics and enabling prediction through models is becoming increasingly important as world populations continue to grow and migrate increasingly to coastal areas and as global and regional ocean and atmospheric climatology change.  Vastly increasing coastal population shifts are drastically modifying the coastal ocean and floodplain, through deforestation, land development, dredging, levee construction, and intensive aquaculture, fundamentally changing the wind wave, tide, storm surge and hydrologic response to a specific event. In addition, anthropogenic induced global atmospheric and oceanic climatology change is driving more powerful and larger storms that are trending to move more slowly and producing more intense rainfall rates and larger total rainfall volumes.

 The objectives of the workshop are to improve our understanding of the underlying physics and improve simulation model skill. Specifically, the workshop is focused on:

●       providing a forum for the exchange of ideas and information related to wind, wave, and storm surge hindcasting and forecasting including fully-integrated coastal warning systems, and description of present and future states of the climate;

●       promoting cross-cutting, multi-disciplinary, scientific/engineering collaboration in the field of coastal risk and resiliency, including long term planning, mitigation, impact-based forecasting and the role of natural protection; and

●   coordinating ongoing research and development initiatives and discussing priorities for future research and development.

Broadly the workshop's topics include field observations, laboratory studies, theoretical foundations to improve process descriptions, model implementation from computational algorithms to code architecture, data assimilation, artificial intelligence, process interaction (wind wave/storm surge, ice/wind wave, ice/storm surge, hydrology/tide/surge), verification/validation/uncertainty quantification, to operational applications in short and long term forecasting and statistical hazard analysis. Specific topics in the wave arena include improved methods for wave prediction in complex conditions and environments, ocean wave climate and wave measurements, user requirements, best practices and evaluation to improve the physics of wave generation, extreme seas, wave generation in complex geometries, near-coast applications, and unique waves such as rogue waves, solitons, and infragravity waves.

Topics for the surge and coastal hazards arena include developing tools for quantifying future coastal and offshore risks and resiliency by predicting storms and storm effects associated with waves, currents, surges and other processes that affect communities in coastal areas. Coastal inundation forecasting from multiple sources is of particular interest. Storm surge topics include operational forecasting; global and regional hindcasts; storm surge climatology; data collection and instrumentation; data assimilation into numerical models; wave-current interaction; surge-ice interaction; compound flooding; shallow water and nearshore effects; wind fields for wave hindcasting or forecasting: extremal analysis; case studies, past and future climate trends and variability.

The 3rd International Workshop on Waves, Storm Surges, and Coastal Hazards, Incorporating the 17th International Waves Workshop, took place October 1 - 6,  2023 at the University of Notre Dame. The final program was organized into 3 plenary sessions and 30 parallel sessions for a total of 125 oral presentations over the course of the week and the remainder being poster presentations spread over the five days. Final attendance was 177 onsite participants and 25 remote participants. Forty five of the participants were students/postdocs/early career scientists.  Workshop presentation pdfs from this workshop were made available after the meeting and can be found at http://www.waveworkshop.org/17thWaves/index.htm .

This workshop series has had an exemplary tradition of creating community and fellowship much in the way that Gordon Conferences do.  This focus on communal gathering led to easy interaction between all participants in and out of the sessions and many questions were asked and discussions took place. The size of the conference is also optimal for engendering easy interaction. While many participants were regular attendees in the series, a large group of early career/postdoc/student scientists joined the series for the first time, were energetic participants and were able to develop connections amongst themselves and senior investigators.  Taylor Engineering, a leading coastal engineering consulting company, sponsored and hosted a student/young professional luncheon where a panel of engineers from industry, government and academia were on hand to discuss career paths and answer career questions.

Last Modified: 01/20/2025
Modified by: Joannes J Westerink