RECENT NEWS ITEMS                                                                                       

February 4, 2008 -- NAD Regional BEACH-fx Workshop
New York District office

A third encore performance of the Beach-fx national roll-out workshop was held the week of 4 February at the New York District office. Contact Mark B. Gravens (ERDC-CHL) at 601-634-3809 (Mark.B.Gravens@erdc.usace.army.mil) or Lynn Bocamazo (NAN) at 917-790-8396 (Lynn.M.Bocamazo@usace.army.mil) for information regarding this workshop.

December 11, 2007 -- SAD Regional BEACH-fx Workshop
Atlanta, GA

A second encore performance of the Beach-fx national roll-out workshop was held the week of 11 December in Atlanta, GA. Contact Mark B. Gravens (ERDC-CHL) at 601-634-3809 (Mark.B.Gravens@erdc.usace.army.mil) or Kaiser Edmund (SAD) at 404-562-5118 (Kaiser.E.Edmund@usace.army.mil) for information regarding this workshop.

October 23-26, 2007 -- Jacksonville District BEACH-fx Training Workshop
Jacksonville FL
An encore performance of the Beach-fx national roll-out workshop was conducted at the Jacksonville District office 22-26 October.

August 28-31, 2007 -- National BEACH-fx Roll-out Workshop
Vicksburg MS (CHL / ERDC)

The Beach-fx national roll-out workshop was held from August 28-31 at the Vicksburg, MS site of ERDC. The purpose of the workshop was to provide a detailed overview of Beach-fx concepts including motivation for development, model framework, interface description, data requirements, input and output files, project lay-out, and development of economic and coastal processes input data streams (first day and a half) and was attended by 37 participants. The last two days involved guided hands-on training exercises and was attended by 24 participants. The training session involved development of a complete example project application including population of the input databases and specification/simulation of with and without project alternatives. The workshop participants included representatives from South Atlantic Division, Mobile District, Wilmington District, North Atlantic Division, New York District, Norfolk District, Philadelphia District, and Los Angeles District. Beach-fx is a comprehensive new analytical framework for evaluating the physical and economic benefits and costs of shore-protection projects. The model has been implemented as an event-based Monte Carlo life cycle simulation tool that is run on desktop computers. The Beach-fx development goals are to

• Improve on the analytical shortcomings of traditional, frequency-based approaches
• Provide more realistic estimates of life-cycle benefits and costs
• Incorporate elements of risk and uncertainty
• Integrate coastal process simulation with economics
• Generate science-based information to aid decision making
• Develop information to communicate plan performance to stakeholders

Beach-fx was submitted for certification under the Planning Models Improvement Program. This model was submitted as a USACE Corporate Model that requires a Level 1 review. A certification report was produced in June 2007 and the PCX-CSDR and model developers are currently working to resolve the issues identified by the certification review team and to complete the certification process for this new corporate model.

For more information about this model and research program, please contact Mark B. Gravens at 601-634-3809 (Mark.B.Gravens@erdc.usace.army.mil )