Thomas Wahl

In 1900, coastal communities could expect certain extreme water level events to occur on average once in a century; in other words there was only a 1% chance to experience such an event in any given year. Now, the same extreme water level is expected about once every eight years, on average, due to the…

For almost a century, researchers have known that vertical land motion — the lifting and sinking of the ground — affects sea level locally. As the ground sinks, the sea level rises relative to the land. Scientists also assumed this process generally occurred at a steady rate over time. But a research team that includes Thomas…

Pravin Maduwantha Gamage, a graduate student in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering, has received the Florida Stormwater Association Educational Foundation (FSAEF) Scholarship, which recognizes students dedicated to advancing the field of stormwater management. The award was given to only four students in Florida and was presented during the Florida Stormwater Association’s winter conference,…

The University of Central Florida is part of a new $22 million project to help understand the future of the Mississippi River delta and ways to combat land and ecological losses. The work is through a five-year grant awarded to the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in order…

Four mid-career researchers from the University of Central Florida received Rising Stars awards by the Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida (ASEMFL), a group that brings together the nation’s most distinguished and impactful scholars who live and work in Florida. They are among 12 honorees competitively selected from nominated researchers at universities across…

Thomas Wahl, associate professor of civil engineering and a member of the UCF Coastal Systems Faculty Cluster, has received the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) and the Early Career Science Medal from the International Association for the Physical Sciences of Oceans (IAPSO). The dual accolades…

Seafloor cables carry over 95% of all digital data traffic worldwide, including financial trading information and social media communications. However, how the Earth’s changing climate could impact this vast undersea network has been relatively understudied until now. In a new global study published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, an international team of researchers led by the…

The U.S. National Science Foundation has named eight UCF professors 2022 NSF CAREER award recipients. All of the recipients are engineers by training who are working on interdisciplinary projects that aim to improve health or to develop new technology that promises to improve our lives. The awardees represent the most promising junior researchers in the…

Extreme storms, like Sandy or Xaver, don’t happen often but when they do, cities need to be prepared. That’s why researchers have developed a new method, detailed in a study published this week in Nature, to determine where extreme events, like 100-year storm floods, are more likely to occur, whether the likelihood of such extremes is…

A University of Central Florida researcher is part of a new, nearly $20 million award from the U.S. National Science Foundation that will develop a Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub. The hub, known as MACH, will be led by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and will involve multiple universities and experts from across disciplines.…