Smart Sea Level Sensors and Coastal Flooding in Georgia

Coastal flooding represents a growing threat to the City of Savannah and adjoining areas in Chatham County, which are home to diverse communities rich with cultural heritage and thriving economies. Recent brushes with Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Irma in 2017 saw storm surges of 7+ feet at the county’s only two tide gauges, shutting down county schools and businesses for days.

During these extreme weather events, strong winds interacted with an extremely intricate network of coastal rivers, tributaries, and marshlands to create a complex pattern of flooding that varied by 2-4ft over a distance of several miles. The “Smart Sea Level Sensor Project” aims to install a large network of 50-100 internet-enabled water level sensors across flood-vulnerable Chatham County, via a working partnership between officials from the Chatham Emergency Management Agency (CEMA) and the City of Savannah, together with a diverse team of scientists and engineers from Georgia Tech.

The sensor network will span a wide range of tributary sizes, orientation, and building densities. The data collection will be complemented by a suite of modeling tools to inform flood risk and vulnerability, including a high-resolution coastal ocean model as well as an integrated hydrological model to capture surface runoff during high precipitation events.

Taken together, the framework enables the assessment of short- and long-term coastal flooding risk and vulnerability that are required to inform planning for flood mitigation strategies in Chatham County and other coastal communities across the southeastern US.

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