Prediction of Weather and Climate Effects on Integrated Watershed, Estuarine, and Coastal Ocean Dynamics

Dear Colleagues,

The Low-Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ) occupies only 2% of the Earth’s land area, but is home to over 10% of the planet’s human population and covers 13% of the global urban space. It is through this increasingly urbanizing region that the world’s major freshwater rivers reach their destinations. Our estuaries, where these rivers meet the sea, have been among the most productive ecosystems of the world since primeval times. The Coastal Ocean provides critical habitat to over 90% of all known marine species.

The ancient aphorism everything flows uses the generic observation that the Earth’s hydrosphere is in constant flux to communicate the interconnected transience that bewilders any Eulerian observer and student of natural phenomena. Indeed, the world’s coastal zones are not only critically important to life and civilization, as described above, but also complex dynamic subsystems of an interconnected whole comprised by flood plains, estuaries, and the coastal ocean with ever-shifting, ever-evolving, porous or transparent boundaries, influenced by weather patterns, climatological modes, long-term climate change, and human development. Our ridge-divided coastal watersheds and policy-defined coastal waterbodies, and the flora and fauna within them, increasingly feel the pressures of these stresses. Climate change indicators, such as water and air temperature, sea level, and the frequency of extreme events, attest alarming alterations of the environment that affect life and property of our human communities that live on the LECZ and utilize its surrounding coastal resources. Therefore—and in order to inform smart, adaptive management strategies and conservation initiatives—predictions and projections of the coastal zone’s physical space and ecosystems need to utilize comprehensive, unified energy flow models that account for these effects from the macroscopic, synoptic and ecosystem level to the very detailed level of human engineering.

Coastal circulation models are becoming an increasingly critical component of marine sciences and engineering. As our observational capabilities, physical understanding of underlying land-sea-air processes, statistical techniques, and numerical resources have all increased dramatically during the past 50 years of high-tech revolution, these models have become ever more detailed, physically-based, and useful. Over the last 10 years, their scope has expanded to unify and integrate atmospheric, terrestrial, fluvial, and oceanic processes. These are tools that improve our understanding of basic scientific processes, help interpret sparse observations, and rigorously evaluate scenarios for engineering and management use. The development of such predictive numerical models in geosciences is the ultimate application of our understanding of the natural world, its processes and interactions with the biosphere. Integrated models can help us realize both what we know (and can confidently forecast and perhaps responsibly steer), and what we still do not comprehend well enough (and need to focus basic research on). Some 2500 years since Heraclitus’ times of oracles and superstition, and the emergence of the scientific method, skillful, science-based, short-term predictions of extreme events and long term predictions of future states have finally become available and are increasingly sought out by emergency and resource managers around our constantly transforming, limited, still dangerous, but uniquely beautiful, accommodating, and economically irreplaceable coastal zones.

It is with these thoughts in mind, that this Special Issue of the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering is launched to provide a compilation of current state of the art and future perspectives in the “Prediction of Weather and Climate Effects on Integrated Watershed, Estuarine, and Coastal Ocean Dynamics”. Authors of comprehensive literature review papers that can guide further discipline development, as well as original scientific and engineering works with strong potential for general application, are invited to submit an article to be considered for this Special Issue.

Dr. Nickitas Georgas
Guest Editor