Overview

Hazard Exposure Reporting and Analytics (HERA) helps communities understand how coastal hazards could impact their land, people, infrastructure, and livelihoods by providing data and tools to map and estimate community exposure to various natural hazards. 

Our web tools include a combination of maps, graphics, and data dashboards and have three goals: 1) To provide communities with data that may help them to reduce unacceptable risks, 2) to raise awareness of the potential influence of various factors on hazards, such as sea level rise or storm frequency, and 3) to identify places or sectors that may need more local studies.

Users can use these tools to:

• Build maps with hazard scenarios and community assets
• Estimate the number of people and amount of economic assets, infrastructure, and land that are in a specific hazard zone
• Understand hazard exposure in a community to different scenarios
• Compare hazard exposure across many communities
• See how uncertainty in the computer models can change hazard-exposure estimates
• Download results for other uses

HERA Tools include:

• Coastal Flooding: Use this tool to see maps and exposure data for coastal flooding hazards based on storm and sea level rise scenarios.
• Coastal Groundwater: Use this tool to see maps and exposure data for groundwater depths based on sea level rise scenarios.
• Shoreline Change: Use this tool to see maps and exposure data for shoreline change hazards (e.g., erosion) based on sea level rise, storm, and coastal management scenarios.
• Multi-Hazard Viewer: Use this tool to see maps of different coastal hazards based on sea level rise, storm, and coastal management scenarios.

Audience

• Any individual who wants to learn about how their community could be affected by natural hazards
• An advocate who wants to encourage others to reduce the potential impacts of hazards in their community
• A planner who wants to include hazard issues into plans or projects such as hazard mitigation, capital improvements, land use, social services, or economic development
• A policymaker who wants to develop guidance documents, policies, or regulations to reduce hazard impacts
• A researcher who wants to use our data for more refined studies of community exposure to natural hazards