Highlights of Dutch and US coastal graduation projects in the Mississippi Delta after Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

This paper presents the highlights of coastal graduation projects conducted in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina from students of universities in The Netherlands (Delft, Twente, Groningen, Amsterdam, Wageningen) and Louisiana (LSU, UNO). The intent is to show good examples of how knowledge and modeling tools in the field of coastal engineering, typical to the Netherlands, is applied in an international context. Three illustrative examples are summarized. The first example is the development of an innovative forecasting tool for predicting storm surge in the Louisiana coastal zone. This tool has successfully been applied during training exercises and reallife applications in New Orleans. Second, an in-depth study has been carried out to increase the understanding of the effectiveness of diversions to restore wetlands. Practical recommendations were provided for the choice of location and size of diversions in the Lower Mississippi. A third example is the long-term morphological modeling of the Wax Lake Delta. Various characteristics of this delta development were reproduced by the model, but also limitations of the predictive performance of the model were detected. This paper will close with an outlook on further collaboration between Louisiana and The Netherlands.