Katy Serafin
Assistant Professor
- Gainesville FL UNITED STATES
- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Katy Serafin researches extreme sea levels, coastal flooding and erosion hazards.
Contact More Open optionsBiography
Katy Serafin researches extreme sea levels, coastal flooding and erosion hazards to better understand how our coastlines are changing and the resulting impacts to people and places. Katy combines observational datasets with statistical and numerical models to understand the frequency, drivers and impacts of coastal flooding and erosion events. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Areas of Expertise
Social
Articles
The Timing, Magnitude, and Relative Composition of Extreme Total Water Levels Vary Seasonally Along the U.S. Atlantic Coast
JGR OceansGabrielle P. Quadrado and Katherine A. Serafin
2024-09-20
The annual maximum (AM) method, which subsamples time series to retain the maximum event per year, and the peak-over-threshold (POT) method, which extracts values exceeding a threshold to define extremes, have long histories in determining flood event frequency. In practice, extreme value distributions applied to AM and POT events often assume that the data comes from the same statistical population. Locations across the world, like the United States (U.S.) Atlantic coastline, however, experience high coastal water levels driven by various individual processes and storms with different driving mechanisms during different seasons.
A Hybrid Framework for Rapidly Locating Transition Zones: A Comparison of Event- and Response-Based Return Water Levels in the Suwannee River FL
Water Resources ResearchR.A. Jane, et al.
2022-11-15
Flood risk assessments commonly use event-based approaches to reduce the number of scenarios required to be run through computationally intensive physical process models. Often the return period of the response variable (e.g., a fluvial water level or overtopping discharge) generated by an event (e.g., upstream/downstream water level or set of sea state variables) does not match that of the event itself; a limitation of event-based approaches which can lead to the misspecification of flood risk.
Compound Flooding in a Subtropical Estuary Caused by Hurricane Irma 2017
Geophysical Research LettersBraulio Juárez, et al.
2022-09-22
Hurricane Irma affected the Florida peninsula from 10 to 12 September 2017. The peninsula's east coast was hit hardest: the city of Jacksonville flooded around the St. Johns River estuary with storm surge that exceeded 1.5 m and rainfall that surpassed 20 cm in 24 hr. This study used observations such as water and wind velocities, river discharge, and salinity data to determine whether compounding forcings influenced flood levels.
A performance-based approach to quantify atmospheric river flood risk
Natural Hazards and Earth System SciencesCorinne Bowers, et. al
2022-04-19
Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are a class of meteorologic phenomena that cause significant precipitation and flooding on the US West Coast. This work presents a new Performance-based Atmospheric River Risk Analysis (PARRA) framework that adapts existing concepts from probabilistic risk analysis and performance-based engineering for application in the context of AR-driven fluvial flooding.
