About County Profiles

Overview

The CASCA County Profiles tool is an updated re-implementation of the Coastal County Snapshots tool created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office for Coastal Management Digital Coast program. This tool, like the NOAA Coastal County Snapshots, can be used as an easy-to-digest summary of a county's given risks and exposure related to sea level rise and delta flooding. This can be a helpful starting place when considering interventions or assessing community resilience to climate change. As with other CASCA tools, these county profiles are scoped to California; the original NOAA tool had national coverage.

Updates to the original NOAA tool stopped when updates to the original Economics: National Ocean Watch (ENOW) dataset were paused due to unavailable employer-level microdata. This tool is built on a recalculated dataset excluding that microdata, using a similar methodology to Open ENOW.

A brief history of NOAA Coastal County Snapshots

NOAA Coastal County Snapshots are an easy way to generate reports visualizing data and risk for coastal counties and Great Lakes economies throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. I originally stumbled on the tool while reviewing OPC's California's 2024 Sea Level Rise Guidance for resources to add to the updated CASCA Comparison Tool. Appendix 4 (OPC, pp. 97-99) lists available tools that could be useful for planning community resiliency projects. When reviewing the tools listed, I noticed that the Coastal County Snapshots were no longer being updated. Reviewing the USC Sea Grant's Coastal Practitioner Survey from 2023, over 10% of practitioners use the Coastal County Snapshots tool (p. 38-39, Figure 19.3). It's clear maintaining this tool has value.

The tool seems to have been introduced in 2016, and the current iteration of the Coastal County Snapshots adding more graphics, the handouts, and all four snapshots seems to have rolled out sometime in 2022. On or around 10 June 2026, the Coastal County Snapshots page introduced a banner saying the datasets are no longer being updated. This aligns with the timeline of the creation of Open ENOW around March 2026 as a stopgap for ENOW. ENOW was the core dataset behind the economic snapshots, but relies on "employer level microdata" which is for some reason unavailable. ENOW covers 2005 to 2021, and the economy topics in the NOAA tool have source citations for 2018/2019, so it's fair to assume the information is dated. It's unclear why NOAA chose to pause the whole tool instead of just the economic data.

Although NOAA did not detail their methods exactly, CASCA County Profiles are built off the various FAQs, explainers, and guidance documents provided for ENOW and the Coastal County Snapshots. I worked with Claude to rebuild a pipeline using open source data that follows the available documentation including the ENOW estimation process. It's not an exact copy; although the output was checked against ENOW figures and the Coastal County Snapshots for consistency, some of the source data is withheld or anonymized in the open version, so there is some error (see the relevant topic pages below for more information). Some adaptations were made to tailor it to California in line with OPC guidance. The process used here can now update regularly based on when other data sets are refreshed to provide more up-to-date snapshots. If ENOW is ever updated with the microdata, this tool will pivot to ENOW as the datasource.

Features

This tool recreates the main features of the NOAA tool for 27 California shoreline and inland counties exposed to risks associated with sea level rise, both coastal and inland (delta flooding). This tool also adds sea level rise data for the three delta counties. As with the original NOAA tool, each county has up to four topics (what NOAA called "snapshots"):

• Flood Hazard: Overlays local vulnerability data over FEMA 100-year (1% annual chance) flood plain. This is titled "Special Flood Hazard" in the NOAA tool.
• Sea Level Rise: Highlights social and environmental risks based on 2-, 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-foot sea level rise increments at the local tide gauge.
• Total Economy: A summary of economic county data. This is titled "Total Coastal Economy" in the NOAA tool.
• Marine Economy: Highlights economic data specifically relating to sectors reliant on coastal resources.

The Sea Level Rise topic references the nearest relevant tide gauge and follows California's 2024 guidance regarding sea level rise scenarios. Certain topics for some counties are excluded when not enough data is available. Each topic is presented digitally in a slide-show-style format mirroring the original NOAA Coastal County Snapshot tool. When printing, each topic is formatted so it can be used as a handout.

Differences from the NOAA tool

Graphs and charts have been mostly recreated from the original Coastal County Snapshots tool but in some cases changed for clarity such as economic charts which were illegible as pie charts. Because the original datasets are unavailable, imputed values are used where source data is not available in Total Economy and Marine Economy topics; see Economy figures in detail for how these are calculated. Instead of presenting an inset map like in the original NOAA tool, maps in this tool provide links to the selected county and relevant layers in the CASCA Map tool. This is because map data in CASCA is pulled from live data sources, while presumably the NOAA tool does some processing and caching of map data.

This tool pulls the latest available data from existing datasets along with a CASCA-derived version of the ENOW dataset. Because data sources are often country-wide and need to be bounded by county, a cross section of data is compiled for each county into a downloadable JSON file. The JSON includes the sources, values, and confidence signals for estimated or withheld figures. These figures are saved as dated snapshots, allowing for retrievable (and citeable) historical versions. Methodology and data changes are tracked on the changelog. See the links below for more information such as significant differences, how the economic figures are calculated, and how the data was selected.