Session Abstracts:
Coastal Flood Modeling: Getting the Winds Right
Abstract: Substantial advancement has occurred over the past 2-3 decades in both atmospheric and hydrodynamic modeling. From the perspective of predicting the consequences of storms on coastal environs, accurately capturing both the atmosphere (principally the wind velocity and atmospheric pressure) and the hydrodynamics (flood depths, waves, water velocities) are critical, due to their interrelationship (e.g., the atmosphere mostly drives the hydrodynamics) and because they act together to alter shorelines, damage homes and infrastructure, and take lives. Despite their interconnectedness and the growing use of coupled ocean-atmospheric models, the suitability of atmospheric models for generating accurate storm surge, flooding and associated consequences, is often overlooked. This issue arises in multiple contexts including historical re-analyses, future climate prediction, and event forecasting and is particularly challenging for dealing with the strong intensities and gradients associated with tropical cyclones. This talk will present examples of these challenges together with methodologies for enhancing tropical cyclone wind and pressure fields for coastal hazard prediction that may be of interest for inclusion into SimCenter tool libraries.
Bio: Rick Luettich is Alumni Distinguished Professor in the departments of Earth, Marine and Environmental Science, and Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he also directs the pan-university Center for Natural Hazards Resilience. He has an undergraduate and master’s degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech and a doctor of science in civil engineering from MIT.
His research addresses water movement in complex coastal systems. He is a principal developer of the ADCIRC circulation and storm surge model that is widely used by the academic, government and private sectors for coastal flood hazard assessment under current and future climate conditions, mitigation design, event-based forensics and forecasting.
Rick is actively engaged in the coastal science and coastal resilience communities, serving as the lead PI of the Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence since 2008; the inaugural-PI of the NOAA Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed from 2010-2018; and a member of three National Academies study committees on coastal hazards (chairing the 2013-14 committee on Coastal Risk Reduction), the Board of Commissioners of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority from 2012-2019, and numerous other coastally-related advisory boards.