CoastDef, short for Costal Defense, is a modeling tool that helps scientists, engineers, designeers, economists and engaged citizens analyze and plan for coastal flooding. It abstracts away as much of the programming details as possible, while giving users tools to make innovative, powerful models quickly.
CoastDef focuses on two questions. First, it aims to model where storm surges cause flooding using geospatial analysis. Secondly, it hopes to help us design sensible adaptation strategies by weighing the costs and benefits of flood control infrastructure. For more on our values and goals, click here.
These instructions focus on installing CoastDef on your local machine. It also discusses using Google Colab for projects, though the first tutorial goes into greater detail.
Our tutorials illustrate the core functionality of the CoastDef package. This is the best place to get started, and looking here first will make our more abstract documentation easier to understand. The tutorials illustrate the entire modeling pipeline, with a case study of Bridgeport, Connecticut. This is also a good place to copy initial code from when you're starting a new project.
Why CoastDef needs the data it does, and how you can aquire it.
This provides both academic justification for the choices we made in our standard sample model and advice for making your own models. We also discuss some of the weaknesses of our standard model.
Here are all of the details on CoastDef's built in functions, methods, classes, and workflow. This area is under construction; for the moment, the tutorials are a better place to go.