Coastal decision‐makers' perspectives on updating storm surge guidance tools.

This paper reports on the process and results of focus groups conducted as stakeholder engagement for a two‐year, marine extension agency‐sponsored interdisciplinary project in coastal Louisiana, USA. The project involved refining the topographic features (eg flood protection infrastructure) of a computational storm surge model using local knowledge of elevation data. Coastal Louisiana experiences continual changes to the built and natural environment and persistent land loss, necessitating frequent adjustments to real‐time storm surge and restoration planning models to make them more useful for decision‐makers. Stakeholder involvement ensured accurate updates to the real‐time computational system and accessible and understandable modelling results displayed by an interactive decision‐support tool. The findings provide insights and recommendations from various practitioners that are applicable to decision‐support model and tool development for coastal hazard emergency response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]