Hurricane Gustav (2008) Waves and Storm Surge: Hindcast, Synoptic Analysis, and Validation in Southern Louisiana

Abstract

Hurricane Gustav (2008) made landfall in southern Louisiana on 1 September 2008 with its eye never closer than 75 km to New Orleans, but its waves and storm surge threatened to flood the city. Easterly tropical-storm-strength winds impacted the region east of the Mississippi River for 12–15 h, allowing for early surge to develop up to 3.5 m there and enter the river and the city’s navigation canals. During landfall, winds shifted from easterly to southerly, resulting in late surge development and propagation over more than 70 km of marshes on the river’s west bank, over more than 40 km of Caernarvon marsh on the east bank, and into Lake Pontchartrain to the north. Wind waves with estimated significant heights of 15 m developed in the deep Gulf of Mexico but were reduced in size once they reached the continental shelf. The barrier islands further dissipated the waves, and locally generated seas existed behind these effective breaking zones. The hardening and innovative deployment of gauges since Hurricane Katrina (2005) resulted in a wealth of measured data for Gustav. A total of 39 wind wave time histories, 362 water level time histories, and 82 high water marks were available to describe the event. Computational models—including a structured-mesh deepwater wave model (WAM) and a nearshore steady-state wave (STWAVE) model, as well as an unstructured-mesh “simulating waves nearshore” (SWAN) wave model and an advanced circulation (ADCIRC) model—resolve the region with unprecedented levels of detail, with an unstructured mesh spacing of 100–200 m in the wave-breaking zones and 20–50 m in the small-scale channels. Data-assimilated winds were applied using NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division Wind Analysis System (H*Wind) and Interactive Objective Kinematic Analysis (IOKA) procedures. Wave and surge computations from these models are validated comprehensively at the measurement locations ranging from the deep Gulf of Mexico and along the coast to the rivers and floodplains of southern Louisiana and are described and quantified within the context of the evolution of the storm.

Spatial Variation of Damage due to Storm Surge and Waves during Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines

“…Manning's n was assumed to be 0.025 everywhere, though for more detailed inundation analysis in the future, this will need to be adjusted for land use. An important adjustment to the default SWAN setup was the use of an air-sea drag coefficient limiter of 0.003 14),15) imposed on the drag law of Wu 16) . This drag coefficient limiter is the result of multiple airborne sonde drop measurements in hurricanes 15) , and is necessary to prevent the development of unphysical wave heights in the model.…”

Meso-scale Simulation of Typhoon Generated Storm Surge: Methodology and Shanghai Case Study

“…Unlike most past studies, a meso-scale study not only meets the spatial requirements of numerical models, but also does not require much cost for computation. Previous studies on the storm surge were usually conducted at national or local levels (Dietrich et al, 2011a;Butler et al, 2012). In China, most of these studies tended to emphasize the significance of numerical modelling of storm surge and risk analysis either for the 25 coastline on a large spatial scale (>100 km in length) (Zheng, 2010;Tan et al, 2011;Yin, 2011) or for the small scale coastal area (1 -1000m in length) with fine resolution simulation (Zhang et al, 2006;Xie, 2010;Xie et al, 2010;Ye, 2011).…”

“…Fritz et al (2010) simulated the storm surge occurring in the Arabian Sea with a spatial resolution range of 1 -80 km. Due to the high risk of storm surge, there were also many studies conducted in Louisiana, USA (Westerink et al, 2008;Wamsley et al, 2009;Sheng et al, 2010;Butler et al, 2012) and the 20 Gulf of Mexico area (Dietrich et al, 2011a;Dietrich et al, 2011b;Dietrich et al, 2012). Cheung et al (2003) also analysed the emergency plan for Hawaii based on storm surge simulations.…”

Hazard Assessment of Typhoon-Driven Storm Waves in the Nearshore Waters of Taiwan

“…ADCIRC+SWAN has been used and validated for various typhoon events all over the world [38,[57][58][59][60]. It has been found to give good performances for hindcasting the hydrodynamics and sea states around islands [7,8].…”