Nearshore Extreme Events Reconnaissance (NEER)

The goal of NEER is to conduct rapid, pre-storm site characterization, and instrument deployments by interdisciplinary teams to collect perishable data needed to address key hypotheses about storm impacts on coastal areas, including interactions and feedbacks between the natural and built environments and human actions and reactions.

Extreme storms have significant impacts on the nearshore water-land interface (where ocean, sound, and estuary processes interact with the nearby land) that pose high risk to society. Collecting perishable observations before, during, and immediately following major storms will improve understanding and modeling of the interactions and two-way coupled feedbacks between natural-system processes (meteorology, oceanography, geomorphology, hydrogeology, geotechnology, ecology, biology), the built environment, and people’s responses and actions.