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Publications

For an updated list of publications, please visit Dr Muller's Google Scholar page
Papers in review are marked with an asterisk (*).
Student and postdoc mentees are underlined and marked with #
Click on the title to access abstract, then click on the authors to access preprints

17. Impact of Hurricane Maria on beach erosion in Puerto Rico: remote sensing and causal inference

6/19/2021

 
#Perez Valentin, J. and Müller, M.F., (2020), Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2020GL087306
Beach erosion due to large storms critically affects coastal vulnerability, but is challenging to monitor and quantify. Attributing erosion to a specific storm requires a reliable counterfactual scenario: hypothetical beach conditions, absent the storm. Calibrating models to construct counterfactuals requires numerous observations that are rarely available. Storm paths are unpredictable, making long-term instrumentation of specific beaches costly. Optical remote sensing is hampered by persistent cloud cover. We use Sentinel-1 satellite radar imagery to monitor shoreline changes through clouds and propose regression discontinuity as a strategy to estimate the causal effect of large storms on beach erosion. Applied to 75 beaches across Puerto Rico, the approach detects shoreline changes with a root-mean-square error comparable to the resolution of the imagery. Hurricane Maria caused an erosion of 3 to 5 m along its path, up to 40 m at particular beaches. Results reveal strong local disparities that are consistent with simulated nearshore hydrodynamic conditions.

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