Coastal Engineering

 

Students learning about dunes and their effect on beach erosion

Coastal engineering is the study of the natural processes in and anthropogenic impacts on our beaches, inlets, estuaries and coastal communities.  The educational aim of this program is to prepare students with a broad range of engineering skills and knowledge to meeting the evolving challenges in design, planning and management in coastal waters and wetlands.  Students in the graduate program can focus in the principal areas of coastal engineering, environmental fluid mechanics, estuary and marine hydrodynamics, sediment processes and morphodynamics.  Students and faculty are conducting research in the prediction of coastal hazards like storm-induced flooding and pollutant transport, the transport and mixing processes in estuaries and sounds, and the short- and long-term evolution of coastal landforms.

Typical Course Selections

  • CE 581 Fluid Mechanics in Natural Environments
  • CE 582 Coastal Hydrodynamics
  • CE 583 Engineering Aspects of Coastal Processes
  • CE 596 Introduction to Coastal and Ocean Engineering
  • MEA 540 Principles of Physical Oceanography
  • MEA 562 Marine Sediment Transport
  • MEA 582 / GIS 582 Geospatial Modeling and Analysis
  • MEA 792 Advanced Geospatial Modeling with Open Source GIS
  • MAE 560 Computational Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer
  • MAE 776 Turbulence
  • MA 501 Advanced Mathematics for Engineers and Scientists 1
  • MA 534 Introduction to Partial Differential Equations
  • ST 515 Experimental Statistics for Engineers 1
  • ST 730 Applied Time Series Analysis

Faculty