Coastal resilience metrics from Beach-fx

In this Coastal and Hydraulics Engineering Technical Note (CHETN), a preliminary approach is presented to quantify the resilience of dune and beach nourishment projects using metrics from Beach-fx (Rogers et al. 2008).The objectives of this CHETN are to describe how dune and beach nourishment projects fit into the definition of resilience and to identify Beach-fx output data that can be used as metrics to quantify resilience.The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has implemented dune and beach nourishment projects across the country for coastal storm risk management (CSRM) purposes.Quantifying resilience will support the planning and design of resilient CSRM projects. BACKGROUND:A key finding of the North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive Study (USACE 2015) is that resilience can be improved within the CSRM framework.A technical report was published, as a part of the NACCS effort, entitled Use of Natural and Nature-Based Features (NNBF) for Coastal Resilience (Bridges et al. 2015).This report presents a framework for analyzing the contributions of NNBF, such as dune and beach nourishment, to coastal system resilience and states "Models, tools and techniques to assess coastal systems, such as Beach-FX… can be applied to quantify performance…."Beach-fx is the only USACE-approved planning model for dune and beach nourishment projects nationwide.The NACCS study identified Beachfx as a potential research opportunity to understand the performance of dune and beach nourishment projects, and this technical note attempts to provide a preliminary methodology to develop metrics to quantify the resilience provided to communities by dune and beach projects using output data from Beach-fx.