Posted on February 16, 2026
Nor’easters are nothing new for those living along the Atlantic Coast. These winter storms often bring high winds and waves, but their prolonged duration can have a bigger impact on the beaches than fast-moving hurricanes.
Recently, a strong nor’easter took aim at the Outer Banks in North Carolina and sitting right in the middle of its path was a research station known for its coastal engineering expertise and world-class research capabilities.
The Field Research Facility (FRF), located in Duck, North Carolina, is part of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory.
For nearly five decades, the facility has stood watch over what is often called the most studied beach in the world, with cameras, sensors and other technologies monitoring the waves, the wind and the sand.
And while nor’easters are common, this storm put those technologies to the test – a test they passed, continuing to monitor and capture critical data throughout the storm’s peak.
“I think there’s always a big focus on hurricane events and named storms, when some of our biggest erosive events happen in these winter storms that aren’t even named,” said Dr. Brittany Bruder, a research hydraulic engineer based at the FRF.
While nor’easters are somewhat common, this storm was something different – a blizzard.
“It was ice cold,” said Mike Forte, a research physical scientist. “We usually have nor’easters with temperatures in the 40s, so this was much colder. It actually met the definition of a blizzard, which requires three or more hours of white-out conditions. At the end of our pier, we had wind gusts to 62 miles an hour.”
At the peak of the storm, cameras at the facility’s 140-foot Argus Tower kept recording, capturing images as the wind and waves crashed ashore. Also overlooking the beach were cameras from the ERDC-developed CorpsCam network, providing continuous observations. These autonomous systems allowed researchers to collect data when they themselves were unable to travel the hazardous roads.
“Having an autonomous system recording data and sending it out remotely was super helpful to check on conditions,” Bruder said, adding it is a key advantage for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers districts across the country who can monitor coastlines without the time, expense or risk of dispatching survey crews.
But while the cold was exceptional, Forte explained the waves generated from the storm were not just large but lasted for days. A buoy two miles off the coast measured a significant wave height of 14.4 feet.
“But what’s really significant is the duration,” Forte added. “We recorded waves – 8 feet or higher – for 54 hours straight. You can imagine what that does to a beach over time. That duration effect — that’s the real impact.”
Surveys conducted after the storm revealed its erosive power. In addition to pushing a sandbar further from shore, the storm carved away enough sand to fill 877 medium-sized dump trucks.
Sean McGill, another research physical scientist at the FRF, was struck by how that impact was felt differently along the coast.
“It was very, very interesting to see how different sections of the beach were influenced more than the others,” he said. “Some areas it was pretty extreme erosion, and then when you look up the beach, there wasn’t as much scarping.”
Scarping refers to the formation of a steep, cliff-like drop in the sand, created by wave-induced erosion.
The ability of the FRF’s systems to withstand hours of winter weather to capture this complex data is crucial. Because of the rare snowfall, the data collected is a unique point of reference that will make future analysis better.
“A lot of the processing methods we’re looking at involve artificial intelligence and machine learning models … and a lot of things have been trained on sandy white, pretty beaches,” Bruder explained. “So having snow is a good test case to train models.”
For the researchers, the storm reinforced the power winter can unleash on the coast.
“We’ve been sideswiped by a couple of hurricanes these past few years, and this winter storm was the only instance where I went up to my parents’ house to grab my generator because I was concerned about losing power,” McGill shared.
Every storm, no matter how common, presents a critical opportunity to learn. The data continuously collected at the FRF provides a detailed record that can’t be recreated, helping inform future coastal infrastructure designs and develop new storm modeling.
“First and foremost, we hope for the safety of our community, however large events like this do give us the opportunity to measure and observe extreme conditions to improve USACE project resiliency and better protect coastal communities in the future,” Bruder said.
