The Society for Technical Communication is the world’s largest and oldest professional association dedicated to the advancement of the technical communication field. Recently, the association presented the distinguished award of “User Materials Category Best in Show” to the groundbreaking SERDP report entitled, Regional Sea Level Scenarios for Coastal Risk Management: Managing the Uncertainty of Future Sea Level Change and Extreme Water Levels for Department of Defense Coastal Sites Worldwide

The report authored by John Hall, Stephen Gill, Jayantha Obeysekera, William Sweet, Kevin Knuuti, and John Marburger provides regionalized sea level and local extreme water level scenarios for 2035, 2065, and 2100 for over fifteen hundred DoD sites worldwide. A main objective of the report is to enhance and increase the efficacy of screening-level vulnerability and impact assessment for DoD coastal sites worldwide containing permanent or enduring assets. The report contains detailed sections documenting the authors’ approach, results, application, as well as case studies.

In receiving this notable award, the report was considered “to be an outstanding application of technical communication principles, clearly superior in all areas of assessment, and found to have no major flaws and few, if any, minor flaws.” Congratulations to the authors and collaborators on this impressive effort, we look forward to seeing what future research questions are answered as a result of this work!