Tag a Climate API City as coastal

[fungjj92]

Add is_coastal field to City model and populate the field for existing and also future cities.

This work is inspired by Temperate work whose climate risk calculations will need to know to consider coastal conditions. While we generally want development for Temperate to not affect/skew the API, this feature could be helpful for an API user and aligns with other fields already on City, and would meanwhile remove work bloat in Temperate.

[fungjj92]

The NCA considers coasts as it's own georegion, which is appropriate since they experience a lot of climate change related conditions related to the ocean http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/regions/coasts

Up to you to do research to consider how we consider coasts. Consider how many miles in from the coastline is considered coastal area? What is the breadth of effect of coastal disasters like tsunamis or hurricanes?

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Also a potential wrinkle: for future data points, what is coastal may change with sea level rise.

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From a chart footer on the linked NCA site:

Figure 25.1: U.S. population growth in coastal watershed counties has been most significant over the past 40 years in urban centers such as Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, southern California, Houston, South Florida and the northeast metropolitan corridor. A coastal watershed county is defined as one where either 1) at a minimum, 15% of the county’s total land area is located within a coastal watershed, or 2) a portion of or an entire county accounts for at least 15% of a coastal USGS 8-digit cataloging unit. Residents in these coastal areas can be considered “the U.S. population that most directly affects the coast.” We use this definition of “coastal” throughout the chapter unless otherwise specified. (Data from U.S. Census Bureau).

which does not answer what the definition of 'coastal watershed' is, but does pin down their use of 'coastal'.

The chart footer details link out to this page which has a broken link to a NOAA report PDF. Found a NOAA report of the same name (Coastal Population Report) here(pdf), linked to from this metadata page.

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coastal-population-report.pdf

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Cited in the Coastal Population Report is the following report, which goes into detail on the various definitions of 'coastal' and under which situations they are appropriate for use:

Ache, B., K. Crossett, P. Pacheco, J. Adkins, P. Wiley. 2012. “The Coast” is Complicated: A Model to Consistently Describe the Nation’s Coastal Population. Estuaries and Coasts. In Press.

Found here(pdf).

Also here is a copy: the_coast_is_complicated_april_2013.pdf

This report contains the definition of 'Coastal Watershed County' as cited above.

The report divides 'coastal' definitions into those most affecting the coast (watershed counties) and those most affected by the coast (shoreline counties), so for our purposes of finding areas vulnerable to extreme events, the shoreline counties definition should be more appropriate. The shoreline counties definition is more complex, however. The report presents five different definitions as used by various agencies. The authors express preference for the FEMA definition.

Report from NOAA, cited by the above article, which lists the coastal counties they've identified, is here(pdf).

Also here is a copy: NOAA_CoastalCountyDefinitions.pdf

The most recent (2010) FEMA definition, as cited by Crossett et al., comes from:

Crowell, M., K. Coulton, C. Johnson, J. Westcott, D. Bellomo, S. Edelman, and E. Hirsch. 2010. An estimate of the U.S. population living in 100-year coastal flood hazard areas. Journal of Coastal Research 26(2): 201–211.

a non-paywalled version of which is here(pdf)

also: JCR_Est_US_Pop_100y_CFHA_2010.pdf

it discusses methodology, but does not list counties.

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As linked to from data.gov, the FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer may be downloaded directly from here, although it is a ~10GB download and in a proprietary ArcGIS format.

Metadata about NFHL are here and on their ArcGIS site.

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NOAA coastline shapefiles, in varying resolutions.

The Office of Coast Survey Shorelines are preferable among these, as they include the Great Lakes, Alaska, Hawaii, and other areas outside the continental US. The ArcGIS endpoint with the layers referred to in the metadata in the preceding link is here.