Version 0.5.0 — now available for macOS

See which coastlines go under — before they do.

CORA is a desktop coastal risk analyzer. Load elevation data for any shoreline, run sea level rise scenarios, and measure what floods — buildings, hospitals, roads and people — then test whether a sea wall or restored wetland actually helps.

Download for macOSView source

121 MB · Apple Silicon · macOS 11 or later · free and open source

CORA — Coastal Risk Analyzer
The CORA desktop application showing a flood inundation map of South Miami-Dade under a 1.5 metre sea level rise scenario, with a control panel listing impact metrics.
An actual CORA run: South Miami-Dade, Florida at 1.5 m sea level rise, using Copernicus 30 m elevation data.

A worked example, in about a minute

The run shown above covers a 0.2° box over South Miami-Dade, Florida. CORA resolved the connected flood extent, then overlaid WorldPop data to count who lives inside it — the same numbers that go straight into the exported PDF report.

Sea level rise modelled
1.5 m
People inside the flood extent
1,853
Of the study area's population
1.1%
Copernicus elevation resolution
30 m

Recognition

CORA has been judged by scientists and engineers at three competitions.

  • First place

    Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Award

  • Silver medal

    York Region Science and Technology Fair

  • Silver medal

    IgniteCS Expo — Senior Division, Data Science

Everything you need to make the case

CORA turns raw elevation rasters into the numbers a coastal adaptation argument actually rests on.

  • Connected flood modelling

    Goes beyond a naive bathtub fill: only water with an actual path from the sea counts as flooded, so inland depressions aren't wrongly drowned.

  • Real tidal baselines

    Pulls mean sea level from the nearest NOAA tidal gauge instead of assuming zero elevation, anchoring each scenario to locally measured water levels.

  • Population exposure

    Overlays WorldPop demographic rasters to estimate how many people sit inside the flood extent, as a count and as a share of the study area.

  • Infrastructure impact

    Pulls buildings and roads from OpenStreetMap, flags critical sites like hospitals, schools and fire stations, and reports what each scenario takes out.

  • Adaptation strategies

    Draw a sea wall at a chosen height, or sketch a wetland restoration area with an evidence-based reduction factor, then re-run to see what it buys you.

  • Publication-ready reports

    Export a PDF with parameters, methodology, impact and economic damage tables, and a high-resolution inundation map — ready to hand to a planning board.

From raster to recommendation

Four steps, all on your own machine. No account, no cloud processing, no per-analysis billing.

  1. 01

    Load elevation data

    Open a local GeoTIFF, or download Copernicus 30 m elevation for any bounding box straight from OpenTopography with a free API key.

  2. 02

    Set the scenario

    Pick a location and buffer, then dial in sea level rise from 0 to 2 metres — or choose a preset scenario — with an optional tidal gauge baseline.

  3. 03

    Pull in what's at stake

    Fetch buildings and roads from OpenStreetMap for the area. Results are cached locally, so re-running the same coastline is fast.

  4. 04

    Test an intervention

    Draw a sea wall or a wetland restoration polygon, re-run the analysis, and compare the flooded area, damage and exposure against the do-nothing case.

Download CORA

One disk image, no installer wizard, no dependencies to resolve. Python and every geospatial library it needs are already inside the app.

CORA 0.5.0 for macOS

CORA-0.5.0.dmg · 121 MB · released 2026-08-09

Latest
Download the disk image

SHA-256 checksum

76a0713bae6165bb005e5dc5f910d36a099a9546de2a2205f38fd39f1c82f9b6

Verify with shasum -a 256 CORA-0.5.0.dmg

Requirements

  • macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later
  • Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer)
  • About 350 MB of free disk space
  • Internet access for OpenStreetMap, tidal and population data

On an Intel Mac, Windows or Linux, run CORA from source instead — see the repository for the four-line setup.

First launch: macOS will block the app

CORA is not signed with a paid Apple Developer ID, so Gatekeeper refuses to open it on the first try and offers only a Move to Trash button. This is expected for independent software and does not mean anything is wrong with the download — verify the checksum above if you want certainty. To open it:

  1. 1.Drag CORA.app into your Applications folder.
  2. 2.Right-click (or Control-click) the app and choose Open.
  3. 3.Click Open again in the dialog that appears.

You only need to do this once. Settings, downloaded elevation tiles and caches are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/CORA.