Climate change impacts all aspects of the Earth and human systems ( U30T 30TU IPCC AR6 ) and the highly-populated coastal communities are among those experiencing its most disruptive consequences. Extreme weather events on land, loss of wetlands, rising oceans and other direct human-induced changes threaten coastal communities, ecosystems, national and global economies, including America’s trillion-dollar coastal property market and public infrastructure. For example, higher seas increase the risk of coastal flooding to communities and will potentially expose more than 300 million people to flooding risk by 2050 across the globe. Once in contact with land, rising and changing ocean exacerbates land loss through coastal erosion and land subsidence; saltwater can infiltrate and interact with groundwater aquifers as well as mix with surface water resulting in the loss of freshwater supplies. Furthermore, land changes from human activities such as groundwater/hydrocarbon extraction/injection, levee construction, river/sediment management, and urban development can have compounding effects with the naturally-occurring land processes such as tectonics, sediment compaction, erosion, carbonate dissolution/sink holes, with each process modifying the land surface elevation and coastal geomorphology and thus further impacting the land-ocean interface. Combined, these complex and interconnected ocean-land processes impact coastal biogeochemistry and ecology, affect ecosystem structure and function, and threaten biodiversity.
Recognizing the importance and urgency of coastal challenges, multiple inter-agency, national, and international initiatives are addressing the need to increase the resilience of the nation’s coastal communities. These include efforts by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and the Subcommittee on Ocean Science and Technology (SOST) recent Coastal Resilience 30T 30T 30T Force 30T workshop , the White House National Climate Task , the Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction (SDR), the U.S. Global Change Research Program, particularly its coastal efforts ( 30T 30T 30T COAST USGCRP ), the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Coastal Observations Applications Services and Tools ( 30T contributing the 30T 30T ), the Global Ocean Observing System ( GOOS ), as well as programs 30T UN Decade of the Ocean for Sustainable Development Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 30T 30T 30T and the Sendai .
Satellite-based Earth observations are critical to understanding and predicting coastal environments that undergo natural and human-induced changes. Understanding both direct and indirect human-induced changes is equally important in informing studies of coastal resilience. The research solicited through this program will further support priorities of the relevant aforementioned initiatives, and will provide the foundational information and evidence-based knowledge that will help inform solutions to increase resilience of coastal communities.
The goal of this solicitation is to advance our understanding of key physical, biological, biogeochemical, geological, and hydrological coastal processes and their interactions within the interface of the ocean-land-human system, and to enhance our understanding of how these processes will be compounded in rapidly changing coastal environments. To be eligible, proposals to this element must substantively utilize space-based and/or airborne remote sensing data in all studies. Proposals must include an interdisciplinary team of a minimum two and preferably more Co-Investigators from different science disciplines, such as coastal geology and geodesy, hydrology, ocean physics, biology and biogeochemistry, with the ultimate goal of advancing the science objectives to be considered in this solicitation. Proposers must also provide a rationale for their proposed efforts, and explain the importance of such choices within the coastal resilience context.
Deadlines:
- Notice of Intent: April 7, 2022
- Proposal: May 17, 2022