Surging Seas Risk Finder: A Simple Search-Based Web Tool for Local Sea Level Rise Projections, Coastal Flood Risk Forecasts, and Inundation Exposure Analysis
Abstract
Surging Seas Risk Finder (riskfinder.org) is an online tool for accessing extensive local projections and analysis of sea level rise; coastal floods; and land, populations, contamination sources, and infrastructure and other assets that may be exposed to inundation. Risk Finder was first published in 2013 for Florida, New York and New Jersey, expanding to all states in the contiguous U.S. by 2016, when a major new version of the tool was released with a completely new interface. The revised tool was informed by hundreds of survey responses from and conversations with planners, local officials and other coastal stakeholders, plus consideration of modern best practices for responsive web design and user interfaces, and social science-based principles for science communication. Overarching design principles include simplicity and ease of navigation, leading to a landing page with Google-like sparsity and focus on search, and to an architecture based on search, so that each coastal zip code, city, county, state or other place type has its own webpage gathering all relevant analysis in modular, scrollable units. Millions of users have visited the Surging Seas suite of tools to date, and downloaded thousands of files, for stated purposes ranging from planning to business to education to personal decisions; and from institutions ranging from local to federal government agencies, to businesses, to NGOs, and to academia.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMPA31E..03S
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 4327 Resilience;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4328 Risk;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES