Amid a record-breaking blizzard that buried parts of the South Shore in over 30 inches of snow and sent waves crashing over seawalls in Marshfield and Scituate, the Atlantic Resiliency Innovation Institute is collecting and analyzing weather data that it hopes can help officials better prepare for future storms and safeguard the South Shore’s blue economy.
The Atlantic Resiliency Innovation Institute (ARII) operates six buoys along the Massachusetts coast that measure wind speed, water temperature and the size and direction of waves, and it analyzes those data to understand how and where the waves will affect coastal communities, said Dr. Josh Humberston, the director of its Coastal Hazard Lab.
On February 23, the harshest day of this week’s blizzard, an ARII buoy in Marshfield’s waters found that waves reached over 13 feet and wind speed hit a maximum of 48 miles per hour. Scituate saw waves of 11 feet and wind speeds of 38 miles per hour.
In a blizzard of this size, Humberston said that coastal hazards compound each other: snowfall makes the roads inaccessible to emergency responders while coastal flooding and high winds make weather-related emergencies more likely.
“It was just a setup for a really dramatic storm based on the size and intensity of it,” he said.
The mission of ARII’s lab is to research coastal hazards and identify opportunities to make coastal communities more resilient to severe weather, according to its website. The non-profit organization is based in Marshfield and began operations in 2024.
After ARII has collected more long-term data, its data bank and analyses can inform how towns should protect their coastlines by identifying seasonal trends and high-risk areas, Humberston said: data about the size, direction, and timing of waves can improve the engineering of resiliency projects.
Several towns are investing in coastal resiliency projects—Plymouth is designing a replacement seawall, and Duxbury and Marshfield expanded eroded beaches to mitigate flooding.
ARII uses data to analyze how certain mitigation solutions could help municipalities based on individual circumstances, and its lab shares its analyses of data about severe weather events from both from its buoys and from other data-gathering organizations.
As global temperatures warm, severe weather events are becoming more common and more intense across the country. This week’s blizzard was the eighth-largest snowstorm in Boston’s history; the seventh-largest was only four years ago, and six of the top ten occurred since 2003.
Humberston said that, while the size of this blizzard was exceptional, the data that ARII collected reconciles with the weather conditions that formed the storm, and other organizations’ projections about the blizzard were largely accurate.
“Nothing was really unexpected about how it unfolded, which is good because we use its scale in predictions of the future,” he said. “It's not breaking physics, but we may not see a storm like that for five more years or more."
Severe coastal weather events come with both human and economic costs. During this blizzard, salt water flowed over seawalls and into the streets, homes and businesses suffered power outages and high winds created large snow drifts, which can damage town and private property.
Repairing damaged infrastructure to restore power and other utilities during storms costs money, a burden that ultimately falls upon the taxpayer.
“The financial cost of responding to this storm was massive,” Humberston said. “And so people struggled physically now, and they're going to struggle financially later because of the cost of this storm.”
One of the organization’s biggest worries is that Marshfield did not have live tracking of hazards as they appeared, said Humberston. He said one of ARII’s future goals with its sensor technology is to identify hazards in real time to keep civilians and emergency responders safe.
As flood zones expand, more homes and businesses are damaged each year by coastal weather hazards, and the cost of rebuilding rises. In its fiscal year 2026 budget presentation, Marshfield listed maintaining seawalls, expanding beaches and replacing the dike as budgetary challenges. Some coastal shops that attract tourists have closed after repeated batterings by storms made rebuilding less financially viable, Humberston said.
“The status quo is not working. We used to be able to rebuild, but now it's happening more and more often,” he said. “So how do we have a viable solution where people can have jobs, we can have a safe place to live? I think these are big, big questions that people are reckoning with right now.”
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