National Ocean Service Releases First-Modeled Water Level and Wave Dataset

19 February 2025

This image from CORA captures historical maximum water levels for the entire South Carolina coastline. Water-level observations were previously only available from one location, a tide gauge represented by the blue star in the image. The CORA dataset fills gaps in water level observations between tide stations, providing historical water levels at each of the red, orange, and yellow dots, spaced every 500 meters along the coast. (Image credit: NOAA)

Imagine your community is located along a rural part of the South Carolina coast, and you’re trying to plan for future coastal flooding. Planning like this often starts with understanding historic changes in water levels and flood risks in your community. To aid in this understanding, NOS launched the Coastal Ocean Reanalysis (CORA), the first comprehensive modeled dataset for the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean coasts.

CORA delivers more than 40 years of modeled, historical water level and wave information every 500 meters—or roughly every quarter mile—along the US coast. This long-term water level data was previously only available at NOAA tide gauges, which are largely located near population centers like cities and ports. With the release of CORA, coastal communities between NOAA tide gauges can now access the data needed to make informed decisions about their flood risks.

This new dataset paves the way for delivering monthly high tide flooding predictions every 500 meters along the coast—an advancement that would ensure many more communities have timely information about their flood risks to mitigate potential impacts. The dataset can also inform and support innovations in research, machine learning, and policy-making in a variety of businesses and sectors.

CORA was developed by NOS’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, Office for Coastal Management, and Integrated Ocean Observing System. It was also made possible by community-based modeling efforts in partnership with the University of North Carolina’s Renaissance Computing Institute and the University of Hawaii’s Sea Level Center.

Learn more about the Coastal Ocean Reanalysis on the Tides and Currents website and access the data on NOAA’s open cloud platform.

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