Record of storm events and associated water levels for the Virginia Coast Reserve, 1980-2013

This empirical storm record for the Virginia Coast Reserve was created using a 34-year record of hourly wave hindcast data - including wave height (Hs) and wave period (Tp) - from the USACE's Wave Information Studies buoy offshore Hog Island in the Virginia Coast Reserve (Station 63183, 22 m water depth) and hourly records of water level from the nearest NOAA tide gauge (Station 8631044, Wachapreague, VA). The record includes wave and water level statistics for each event relevant for coastal modeling applications: storm start and end times, duration, total water level, still water level, as well as concurrent tidal amplitude, non-tidal residual, Hs, and Tp. The raw data is processed by first removing the 1 yr running median, which accounts for non-stationarity in wave and water level parameters due to inter-annual and decadal variability while maintaining seasonality. The median of the last 3 years is then applied to the entire time series such that the new time series is representative of the current climate. A year-by-year tidal analysis is performed to obtain the tidal amplitude and non-tidal residual. Lastly, water elevations are calculated following the run-up equations of Stockdon et al. (2006). Storm events are then extracted from the corrected time series by conditioning on Hs: events are identified as periods of 8 or more consecutive hours with deep-water significant wave heights greater than 2.1 m, which is the minimum monthly averaged wave height for periods in which waters levels exceeded the measured average dune toe elevation (1.9 m NAVD88) of barriers in the Virginia Coast Reserve. In total, we identify 282 independent sea-storm events over the 34-year record, resulting in an average of 8.3 events per year. See Reeves et al. (2021; https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL092958) and supplementary information therein for complete details of the methodology.