2025 Excellence in Partnering Award

The National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) is pleased to announce that the NOPP Hurricane Coastal Impacts (NHCI) project is the 2025 recipient of the NOPP Excellence in Partnering Award. The Excellence in Partnering Award is given annually to a NOPP project that best exemplifies the NOPP’s objective of developing a successful network of partnerships to advance the ocean sciences. 

NHCI has 9 teams, each with a lead principal investigator (PI), consisting of 13 unique academic institutions, 13 government agencies or divisions, and 11 industry performers. The lead PIs are: Jon Moskaitis of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Dean Gesch (retired) and Jeff Danielson of the U.S. Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, Roland Romeiser of the University of Miami, Luca Centurioni of UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Jim Thomson of the University of Washington, Jenna Brown of the U.S. Geological Survey, Rick Luettich of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Ap van Dongeren and Kees Nederhoff of Deltares USA, and Maitane Olabarrieta of the University of Florida. 

The goal of NHCI is to improve coastal storm impact prediction, focusing on complex effects like breaching, erosion, and property damage, beyond standard inundation. Three modeling teams used common data to predict impacts from six hurricanes, with public data availability for future research. 

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Scientific Development Squadron VXS-1 prepares to airdrop a Sofar Ocean Spotter buoy ahead of Hurricane Ian in 2022. Direct, real-time observations made by airdropped Spotters help improve hurricane forecast models. Image credit: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Scientific Development Squadron VXS-1.

Project highlights: 

  • The three community models performed well in predicting waves, water levels, breaching, erosion, and damages for the hurricanes studied. 
  • New national capabilities for initializing model boundary conditions from space are now operational at USGS. 
  • All data used in the study is publicly available for future research and model improvements in Design Safe. 
  • 9 scientific articles have been published and 24 conference presentations have been given by NHCI authors thus far. 

The NHCI PIs presented and participated in one of the 2024 NOPP Partnership Forums highlighting their work and accomplishments. They then created a Storymap to highlight their work, including graphics, videos, and projections. 

Support for this NOPP project was provided by ONR. 

Learn more about NHCI on the project website.