{
  "abstract": "Municipal tabulations of sea-level-rise exposure are widely used in coastal planning, but they are sensitive to processing choices that are rarely reported. We tabulated NOAA Office for Coastal Management ocean-connected inundation-extent rasters for Connecticut (0.5–10 ft above mean higher high water, MHHW; ~3 m resolution from 2023 statewide lidar) for all 169 municipalities, using 2020 Census boundaries, exact ellipsoidal cell areas and the present-day MHHW extent as a baseline mask. Newly inundated area is 34.7 km² at 1 ft, 51.3 km² at 2 ft, 68.5 km² at 3 ft and 133.3 km² at 6 ft, affecting 45 to 52 municipalities. About 70–75% of this area lies in the 24 Long Island Sound shoreline municipalities, and Old Saybrook is the most exposed in proportion to its land area (9.8% at 1 ft; 18.7% at 6 ft). Land cover shows that most newly inundated area at 1–2 ft is existing tidal marsh (developed land is 3–6%), whereas developed land reaches 27% at 6 ft. Exposure also extends up the tidal Connecticut River beyond the statutory coastal area, a signal that depends on NOAA's inland extrapolation of the tidal surface. Municipal rankings are conditional on scenario and metric: between 1 and 6 ft, Spearman's ρ is 0.74 for absolute area and 0.69 for share of land, and only 6 and 4 of the respective top-ten municipalities are shared. Omitting the MHHW baseline mask overstates exposure 4.6–14.7-fold, whereas generalized boundaries and aggregation to ≈81 m change statewide totals by less than 10% and leave rankings nearly unchanged. Low-increment estimates are sensitive to small vertical offsets (−40% to +27% at 1 ft for ±0.5 ft). A coordinate-based heuristic in an earlier dashboard by the author correlated weakly with these estimates (ρ = 0.45–0.49) and should not be used. The results are screening-level estimates of potential permanent high-tide inundation, without independent validation, and are released with a fully reproducible workflow.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Arav Siddharth Mestry"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/an7xeq2m7815h.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.31223/x57b9f",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "an7xeq2m7815h",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/15643/",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "bepress",
      "Connecticut"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Geographic Information Sciences"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Long Island Sound"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "NOAA Sea Level Rise Viewer"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Oceanography"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Physical and Environmental Geography"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "bathtub model"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "coastal inundation"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "land cover"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "municipal exposure"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "reproducibility"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "sea-level rise"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "sensitivity analysis"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1904|Coastal and Marine Dynamics"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7223110109",
  "pdf_url": "https://eartharxiv.org/repository/object/15643/download/27097/",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-21",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/an7xeq2m7815h.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:17:49Z",
      "native_id": "15643",
      "source": "eartharxiv",
      "url": "https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/15643/"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "earth",
      "origin": "bepress:Oceanography",
      "subfield": "oceanography"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Municipal exposure to sea-level-rise inundation in Connecticut: a reproducible screening analysis of NOAA inundation-extent data and its sensitivity to methodological choices",
  "title_text": "Municipal exposure to sea-level-rise inundation in Connecticut: a reproducible screening analysis of NOAA inundation-extent data and its sensitivity to methodological choices",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:17:49Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/an7xeq2m7815h",
  "venue": "EarthArXiv",
  "versions": []
}