Problem Statement

You are a hydrologist at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers studying the impacts of hurricanes on groundwater levels in a coastal aquifer on the U.S. Atlantic Coast. You have been asked to evaluate whether groundwater will contribute to the flooding in the area and where the flooding will occur. Your report will help town managers decide whether to permit the construction of a new coastal community center 100 feet behind the dunes.

Module Overview

This module will provide you with the basic knowledge to recommend if construction of a community center should proceed considering historical data from previous hurricane impacts near the proposed site. In the first section you will learn how hurricanes form, why they cause flooding and what other impacts they have in coastal communities. In the second section you will learn how to create and analyze report quality time series of hydrologic variables and how to process these time series data to identify different hydrologic processes driving flooding using a python notebook. In the third section, you will be synthesizing all the time series analysis you conducted to support your final recommendation about building the community center.