L. Donelson Wright

William & Mary | WM · Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Owing to the threat of natural hazards such as recurring floods in coastal communities, Nichols, Wright, and Zarillo have submitted work entitled, Integrated Coastal Resilience to Springer (see https://link.springer.com/book/9783031681523). Integrated Coastal Resilience will be published on 24 Sep 2024. This book is part of the book series "Synthes...

Natural hazards include many geophysical and biological phenomenon that have negative effects on humans. In many cases, natural hazards can be predicted based on meteorological, oceanographic, and geological patterns or physical characteristics. Hazards include extreme rainfall from storms, erosion from waves, and ash from volcanic activity. Owing...

Researchers using historical data, information from sensor networks, imagery, and numerical models have characterized the pace and extent of coastal flooding and erosion. The impacts are described in news reports, social media, and scientific literature. For a community to be resilient and “bounce back” after hazardous events such as tropical cyclo...

Communities can increase resiliency by identifying and reducing vulnerabilities, and considering environmental risks (disturbances) when planning and developing. Vulnerability defines the inability of people to resist and adapt to disturbances such as climate hazards. Some ways to resist, recover, adapt and prepare include developing networked sens...

The coastal ocean is an important and dynamic region that includes cities, deltas, estuaries, mariculture operations, navigation channels, and seaports. Teams of scientists, engineers and citizen scientists working to understand and mitigate negative impacts from coastal processes must also understand the individual, group, organizational, and soci...

Scientists, engineers, and community leaders with differing backgrounds and experiences can bring a variety of ideas and perspectives to focus on resilience. Collaboration should help scientists, engineers, managers, executives, staff, and citizen scientists to combine forces to improve coastal resilience. The practice of collaboration involves sha...

The shape of the coast and the processes that mold it change together as a complex system. There is constant feedback among the multiple components of the system, and when climate changes, all facets of the system change. Abrupt shifts to different states can also take place when certain tipping points are crossed. The coupling of rapid warming in...

This Special Issue of the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering includes papers on physical phenomena, such as wind-driven flows, coastal flooding, and turbidity currents, and modeling techniques, such as model comparison, model coupling, parallel computation, and domain decomposition. These papers illustrate the need for modeling coastal ocean...

Low elevation coastal zones (LECZ) are extensive throughout the southeastern United States. LECZ communities are threatened by inundation from sea level rise, storm surge, wetland degradation, land subsidence, and hydrological flooding. Communication among scientists, stakeholders, policy makers and minority and poor residents must improve. We must...

Coastal ocean flows are interconnected by a complex suite of processes. Examples are inlet jets, river mouth effluents, ocean currents, surface gravity waves, internal waves, wave overtopping, and wave slamming on coastal structures. It has become necessary to simulate such oceanographic phenomena directly and simultaneously in many disciplines, in...

Beginning in 2003, the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) enabled an open-access network of distributed sensors and linked computer models through the SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Predicting (SCOOP) program. The goal was to support collaborations among universities, government, and industry to advance integrated observation a...

Impacts from natural and anthropogenic coastal hazards are substantial and increasing significantly with climate change. Coasts and coastal communities are increasingly at risk. In addition to short-term events, long-term changes, including rising sea levels, increasing storm intensity, and consequent severe compound flooding events are degrading c...

The margins of the sea are encroaching landward throughout most of the world. This is happening not simply because of sea level rise but also because the solid material- sand, mud, gravel-composing the shore and the subaerial and subaqueous lands immediately adjacent to it is being displaced. In addition to physical erosion by wave, thermal erosion...

People are integral parts of nature and, in many respects, are becoming dominant parts. This notion is implicit in the term “Anthropocene”. In no environment is the connection between people and nature more apparent than in coastal systems. Mutual causality between humans and nature plays out there on a daily basis, sometimes in very positive ways...

River deltas were the cradles of early civilizations and are currently the habitats of 500 million people. But river deltas worldwide are sinking and being invaded by rising seas. The effects of sea level rise and floods are greatly exacerbated by subsidence and human modifications including reductions in supply of sediment and the extraction of wa...

Floods are among the most common natural hazards with complex and far-reaching impacts. Coastal floods are most often caused by storm surge (coastal), rivers that exceed their flood stage capacity (fluvial), and torrential rainfall (pluvial). Increasingly, compound flooding by all three causes is the most severe. The adverse consequences of flood e...

Coastal Louisiana owes its existence entirely to sediments supplied to the Gulf of Mexico coast by the Mississippi River. Today, land loss greatly exceeds land creation. The extensive engineering works that were intended to protect people and assets from floods and support navigability of the lower Mississippi River are now profoundly implicated in...

Near-surface air temperatures in the Arctic are rising 2 to 3 times faster than are temperatures elsewhere on the earth’s surface. In the near future, the Arctic ocean is likely to become ice free in the summer. While this may be good from the perspective of navigation, it is bad from the perspectives of the unique Arctic ecosystem and Native Alask...

By 2015, the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration had overtaken Tokyo as the world’s largest megacity. The Pearl River Delta is sinking at an average rate of 2.5 mm/year. This subsidence, combined with rising sea level, increased intensity of impact from typhoons and storm surge and projections for increased urban expansion have placed Guangzhou a...

According to NOAA’s Office of Coastal Management, inundation events are the dominant causes of natural-hazard-related deaths in the U.S. and are also the most frequent and costly of the natural hazards affecting the nation. The effects of inundation in other nations such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand and India are often devastating. While the...

Most people tend to think of coasts as material “things”. What you see when you look at a coast at any instant in time may be a beach composed of sand or a coastal wetland consisting of vegetation, mud and crabs and perhaps some methane or hydrogen sulfide gas. But in previous times it may have been very different and it probably will be different...

The entire coast of Florida is vulnerable to rising sea levels, storm surges, and episodic inundation. The threatened assets on the highly developed and urbanized southeast coast include expensive high-rise hotels and condos while those on the “Nature Coast” fronting the Gulf of Mexico are primarily unique natural ecosystems. Both coasts are alread...

Coastal environments are changing throughout the world. Climate is only one of several drivers of change. Collectively, the suite of worldwide changes constitutes what is popularly referred to as “global change”. While climate is an essential and prominent member of that suite of changing environmental conditions, it is not the only thing that is c...

Seas are rising and seriously impacting coasts and coastal communities globally. Global warming is causing melting of glaciers and steric expansion of water volume. Locally and regionally, other effects including land subsidence and the slowing of ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream are causing additional rises. By midcentury, relative sea level...

It is imperative for humanity to anticipate and plan better for the future impacts of climate change and coastal flooding on low-income, elderly and infirm communities living in flood-prone areas. As sea levels rise, low-lying vulnerable urban areas throughout the world will be more frequently flooded by storms. Low-income families will be forced t...

There are three categories of actions that humans need to take in order to minimize the detrimental impacts of global change on tomorrow’s coastal systems. The first, of course, is to cause less harm by reducing our carbon footprint and ceasing to do destructive things like polluting, dredging, severing sediment supply, withdrawing groundwater, ove...

The shape of the land and the processes that mold the land are mutually interconnected and change together as a complex system. The coupled suites of mutually-inter-dependent hydrodynamic, biologic and anthropogenic processes, seafloor and landscape morphologies interact to cause time-dependent sequences of change. In many cases it is moving water...

This book is intended as a conceptual roadmap to show how some of the numerous pieces of complex coastal systems intersect and might interact under changing future environmental regimes. It is addressed to a non-technical but environmentally literate audience that includes the lay public, policy makers, planners, engineers andacademics interested i...

This report was written to encourage good data management among COMT collaborators. The report describes the life cycle of observation and model data collected and processed during the COMT program that ran from September 1, 2013 to August 31, 2018. This report is accessable from the U.S. IOOS Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed website (see https:/...

An ocean modeling program is improving our ability to predict circulation along the U.S. West Coast, dead zones and other coastal ecosystem responses, and storm surges in island environments.

Integrating models from the social and natural sciences could generate a more holistic approach to climate change response planning in coastal communities.

An interdisciplinary, collaborative program is needed to facilitate predictions of the inter-connected factors that will impact coastal systems and the resilience of coastal communities over the next few decades. Two interdisciplinary workshops were held, in 2014 and 2015, to develop consensus as to the needs and scope that might be included in suc...

[1] Strong and strategic collaborations among experts from academia, federal operational centers, and industry have been forged to create a U.S. IOOS Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed (COMT). The COMT mission is to accelerate the transition of scientific and technical advances from the coastal and ocean modeling research community to improved oper...

New advances in near-bed measurement technologies, combined with large-scale multi-institution research programs have yielded significant advances in understanding the processes that govern the suspension, transport and deposition of mud and sand on continental shelves. Advances have been made in five general, but overlapping areas: (1) bottom boun...

Adaptive management offers a way to address the pressing need to take steps to manage for factors affecting hypoxia in the NGOM in the face of uncertainties. The authors of a recent study undertaken by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences identified six elements of adaptive management that are directly relevant to goal...

The Waiapu River sedimentary system, New Zealand, provides a prototype for investigating the relative importance of wave- versus current-supported gravity flows on continental shelf deposition. A two-dimensional model was used to represent gravity-driven sediment transport and deposition on the Waiapu shelf over an annual cycle of storm events and...

Since 1985, scientists have been documenting a hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico each year. The hypoxic zone, an area of low dissolved oxygen that cannot support marine life, generally manifests itself in the spring. Since marine species either die or flee the hypoxic zone, the spread of hypoxia reduces the available habitat for marine species, wh...

A new frontier in coastal morphodynamics involves study of interdependent suites of hydrodynamic processes, coastal and shelf morphologies, and temporal sequences of change on scales of hundreds to thousands of kilometers. The complex process suites that shape major deltaic coasts and shelves are examples. Earlier coastal morphodynamic experiments...

The SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) Program, an initiative of SURA’s Coastal Research Committee, has prototyped information technology (IT) to en- able a new way to do science. The system supports ensemble forecasting, data analysis and visualization of coastal inundation. The service-oriented approach involves modularizing comp...

Instrumented tripods deployed at depths of 40 and 60 m on the shelf off the mouth of the Waiapu River on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island recorded data on waves, currents, and sediment fluxes from May 22 to August 10, 2004. Three major flood events and several wave events occurred during the deployment. Data from acoustic Doppler veloci...

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) has advanced the SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program as a multi-institution collaboration to design and prototype a modular, distributed system for real-time prediction and visualization of the coastal impacts from extreme atmospheric events, including hurricane inund...

Recent field observations from several shelf environments show that gravity-driven transport within negatively buoyant layers is an important mode of fine sediment transport across continental shelves. In the 1990s, strong evidence from the Amazon and Eel shelves stimulated a paradigm shift indicating that hyperpycnal layers do not require autosusp...

Recent field observations from several shelf environments show that gravity-driven transport within negatively buoyant layers is an important mode of fine sediment transport across continental shelves. Specifically, Dick Sternberg, along with his students and colleagues, stimulated a paradigm shift by reporting strong evidence from the Amazon and E...

The estuarine observing system centered at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) aims to provide real-time and archived data in the Lower Chesapeake Bay to help guide the management of natural resources, enable planning for extreme events, facilitate maritime operations, support military security, and advance science and education. The VI...

Wave-supported gravity flows are a class of turbidity currents which rely on the velocity shear produced by waves near the seabed to keep sediment in suspension during the gravity-induced downslope movement of the sediment flow. Offshore of many high load rivers, wave-supported sediment gravity flows dominate the seaward transport of sediment acros...

After making landfall on the North Carolina coast on the morning of 18 September 2003, Category 2 Hurricane Isabel tracked northward parallel to and slightly west of the Chesapeake Bay. At Gloucester Point, near the mouth of the York River estuary, strong onshore winds with speeds in excess of 20 m⋅s-1 persisted for over 12 hours and peak winds rea...

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) has recently deployed a data buoy at Gloucester Point, York River, Virginia as part of the Chesapeake Bay Observing System (CBOS). The data streams collected by the buoy and its associated sensors are wind speed and direction, incoming solar radiation, air temperature, water temperature, salinity, tur...

An analytical model is developed for equilibrium bathymetric profiles off river mouths associated with the shoreward, convex upward portion of subaqueous deltas and clinoforms. The model builds on recent field results demonstrating that gravity-driven flux of suspended mud is important on shelves provided that wave-induced suspension of sediment su...

A field study of bedforms, associated hydraulic roughness, and turbulence was conducted on the inner shelf off the east coast of New Zealand's North Island under conditions that included two significant storm events. Sharply contrasting rough and smooth beds were characterized via field mapping and deployment of instrumented benthic tripods. Rough...

A two-dimensional numerical model was applied to predict large-scale deposition by wave-supported sediment gravity flows on the Eel River continental shelf for four consecutive flood seasons using measured bathymetry, waves and river forcing. The model assumes that sediment-induced stratification maintains the near-bed Richardson number at its crit...

Field observations of shoreface benthic processes made in the Middle Atlantic Bight off Duck, N.C. and on the Eel River shelf off northern California have yielded several types of evidence that gravity-induced downslope transport of suspended sediment may constitute an important, but episodic, mode of across-shelf transport during storms. Observed...

An analytical model of down-slope sediment transport and deposition by wave-supported gravity-driven flows is applied to examine the formation of the mid-shelf flood deposit on the continental margin off of the Eel River in northern California. The model reproduces observed time series of near-bed velocity and deposition following flood events when...

Observations from several shelf environments show that down-slope gravity-driven transport may constitute an important mode of suspended sediment dispersal across shelves and highlight the influence of ambient waves and currents on gravity-induced sediment flux. The phenomena discussed here involve high concentrations of suspended sediment mixed wi...

Tairua/Pauanui embayment is a small headland-bound system on the Coromandel Peninsula on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. The shoreface in this area is steep ( ~0.85) and concave; however, where the profile is steepest, between 10-15-m water depth, the profile is slightly convex. A sedimentological study of the shoreface was condu...

The possibility of sand supply from the shoreface to beaches was evaluated based on a variety of methods involving field data and modeling results obtained from five coasts on three continents representing a wide range of coastal environments. The field data include wave-current measurements, historical seabed soundings and geological surveys. Cros...

Bed stresses in the bottom boundary layer of the York River estuary, Va., were estimated from 3D near-bottom velocities measured by Acoustic Doppler Velocimeters (ADVs) and also by a profiling array of electromagnetic current meters. By assuming the measurements were made in a constant stress layer, four methods of stress estimation were evaluated...

Bottom-boundary-layer velocity profiles, bed stresses and suspended sediment concentration profiles were measured with instrumented tripods in four contrasting shelf and semi-enclosed bay environments that are presently accumulating fine sediments. The sites were: the northern California shelf off the mouth of the Eel River; Eckernförde Bay, southe...

Field measurements of bed micromorphology (roughness), benthic flow, bed stress, and suspended-sediment flux were made on the northern California continental shelf in connection with the STRATAFORM program. A sediment profiling camera and side-scan sonar were used to observe bed features in December 1995. Biogenic roughness with ∼2 cm relief prevai...

The sedimentary structure preserved within the seabed of Eckernförde Bay was investigated together with the oceanographic processes influencing that structure. A series of four cruises were undertaken during winter to summer conditions. An instrumented tetrapod was deployed to monitor boundary-layer processes controlling sediment transport. Coring...

A bottom-mounted, circularly scanning sonar was used to observe the methane-rich seafloor of Eckernförde Bay during the months of April and May in 1993. Event-like changes in the acoustic signal were observed and are shown to be caused by scatterers in the water column that are interpreted to be gas bubbles rising in columns having transverse dimen...

Specific objectives of efforts to date have been: a) to characterize the spatial and temporal variability of bed roughness; b) to obtain estimates of time-varying bed stresses at two sites on two across-shelf transects of the mid shelf including one transect in close proximity to the Eel River plume source; c) to evaluate sediment resuspension and...

Wind, wave and currents measurements at 9 and 14 meter water depths on the shoreface off U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility at Duck, North Carolina are presented. Coastal setup accompanied by southerly-setting alongshore currents and seaward cross-shore currents is developed during Northeasterly storms. Coastal setdown, with rever...

A simulation of the nearshore morphodynamics on the inner shelf of the Middle Atlantic Bight, for a one-month period during October 1994 with prevailing extratropical systems, was attempted through a series of models - a wind wave model, a circulation model, and a wave-current combined boundary layer model. The STWAVE model was used to calculate sp...

 An instrumented tetrapod was deployed for three weeks on the Dry Tortugas Bank at a depth of 26 m in February 1995. Bottom roughness was dominated by shrimp burrows and worm mounds with rms roughness amplitudes ranging from 0.47 to 1.75 cm. Logarithmic velocity profiles show apparent total roughness heights ranging from 0.30 to 1.45 cm, values con...

In relatively low-energy estuarine environments where bottom skin friction shear stresses do not appreciably exceed the critical shear stress required for sediment transport, benthic biology can profoundly affect the responsiveness of the bed to benthic flows. The bottom boundary layer processes that suspend and transport fine sediments at two site...

Field measurements of bottom boundary layer and sediment-transport processes were made on the Louisiana inner continental shelf in spring 1992 at a depth of 15.5 m, and in spring and summer 1993 at a depth of 20.5 m. Two different wave–current boundary layer/sediment-transport models were applied to the measured near-bed flows. In addition, the log...

The global objective of the VIMS involvement in the STRATAFORM program continues to be to improve understanding of the spatially and temporally varying mechanisms that suspend, transport, and deposit sediment on the continental shelf in the vicinity of the mouth of the Eel River specifically and on continental shelves generally. Common objectives o...

Vertical profiles of near-bottom currents and suspended sediment concentrations were measured on the inner shelf at 20 m depth off the US Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility at Duck, NC, U.S.A. over the month of October 1994. The observations embraced an initial period of calm conditions and a prolonged and evolving high-energy event. T...

Thermohaline density stratification may significantly alter the classic near-bottom logarithmic velocity profile in many weak to moderately energetic, partially mixed estuaries. Results from Eckemförde Bay suggest fits to log profiles which neglect thermohaline stratification may lead to overestimates of bottom stress and roughness of the order of...

Thermohaline density stratification may significantly alter the classic near- bottom logarithmic velocity profile in many weak to moderately energetic, partially mixed estuaries. Results from Eckemf6rde Bay suggest fits to log profiles which neglect thermohaline stratification may lead to overestimates of bottom stress and roughness of the order of...

Ripple measurements and flow and sediment dynamical data obtained from the shoreface of the Middle Atlantic Bight using instrumented tripods were analyzed to evaluate various predictors of ripple geometry and roughness. Ripple roughness controls on sand resuspension and suspended sediment concentration profiles under combined waves and currents wer...

In spring 1993, an instrumented tetrapod was deployed in Eckernförde Bay, Baltic Sea, with the purpose of characterizing physical processes most relevant to sediment resuspension, transport and deposition. Results suggest that sediment transport events in Eckernforde Bay are associated with resonant internal waves. Observed turbidity events were as...

Four bottom roughness models are tested using field data from the inner shelf of the Middle Atlantic Bight. Bottom roughness plays a significant role in calculations of sediment concentration profiles and current velocity profiles. The importance of each of the three parts in the roughness models (grain roughness, ripple roughness and sediment moti...

The fate of sediment seaward of river mouths involves at least four stages: supply via plumes; initial deposition; resuspension and transport by marine processes; and long-term net accumulation. The processes that operate at each stage, and relative roles of each stage in governing the long-term accumulation patterns, vary appreciably with river re...

In Spring 1993, oceanographic and acoustic apparatus were deployed in Eckernfoerde Bay, Baltic Sea. An instrumented tetrapod recorded physical data, revealing turbidity events associated with resonantinternal waves. Acoustic bottom backscattering data at 40 kHz were acquired simultaneously and show features that correlate with the turbidity events....