Using Non-authoritative Sources During Emergencies in Urban Areas - Computational Approaches for Urban Environments - page 332

the development of physics-based, high-resolution numerical models capable of
predicting and simulating hurricane storm surge with reasonable accuracy in coastal
areas.
The Sea, Lake, and Overland Surge from Hurricane model (SLOSH) (Jelesni-
anskietal. 1992 ) developed by the National Weather Service (NWS) has been
extensively used by decision makers to predict storm surge inundation for planning
and emergency management, and it is currently the NWS official operational fore-
cast model for storm surge. Several other numerical models have been developed
over the years to calculate water levels and currents resulting from hurricane storm
surges along the continental shelves and coasts.
Among others are the Advanced Circulation (ADCIRC) model developed by
Luettich and Westerink ( 2004 ), the fully nonlinear Finite Volume Coastal Ocean
Model (FVCOM) developed by Chen et al. ( 2003 ), and the Semi-implicit Eulerian-
Lagrangian Finite Element (SELFE) model developed by Zhang and Baptista
( 2008 ). Recently, the Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed (COMT) compared
the models' prediction skills (Kerr et al. 2013 ) and concluded that they all, except
SLOSH, generated similar predictions for Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Hurricane Rita
in 2005, thus demonstrating the maturity level of storm surge model development.
For this study, a lower-resolution/faster computational time numerical mesh was
used to simulate the Hurricane Sandy storm surge in order to maintain similarity
to models used in operational forecasts (e.g., Advanced Flooding Guidance System
[ASGS]) to represent information that would be available to decision makers before
a hurricane landfall. The coupled version of the two-dimensional depth integrated
version of the Advanced Circulation (ADCIRC) model and the SWAN wave model
(Dietrich et al. 2011 ) was used to simulate hurricane storm surge along the coast.
The ADCIRC model (Luettich and Westerink 2004 ) is a finite element, shallow
water model that solves for water levels and currents at a range of scales and is
widely used for storm surge modeling (e.g., Ferreira et al. 2014 ). This version of
the program solves the Generalized Wave Continuity Equation (GWCE) and the
vertically integrated momentum equations. SWAN is a third-generation spectral
wave model that computes random, short crested wind-generated waves and wave
transformation in the near shore and inland waters (Booij et al. 1999 ). For storm
surge simulation, ADCIRC is forced by the wind and pressure fields and the wave
radiation stress resulting from the wave model. Tides and river inflow can also be
added as a boundary.
The East Coast Mesh (ECM2001) presented by Mukai et al. ( 2002 ) was utilized
with approximately 250,000 nodes and a resolution of approximately 1.2 km along
the study area. ADCIRC allows for the use of an unstructured finite element mesh
with variable resolution along the model domain. The hurricane surge model was
forced by wind and pressure fields developed by a parametric asymmetric wind
model (Mattocks and Forbes 2008 ) that computes wind stress, average wind speed,
and direction inside the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) based on the National