Predicting and studying coastal inundation due to hurricanes and tropical storms is a problem of critical importance to the United States. Hurricane Katrina alone was the costliest and 5th deadliest hurricane in history, with most of the devastation due to wind-driven flooding during the storm. The aftermath of this event has led to a number of federally-mandated studies to determine what failed, the causes of failure, and how to prevent such catastrophes from happening again. Critical decisions will be made in the next several years on how to design better protection systems and improve emergency management practices in the event of future storms.

 

Storm surge is caused by wind, atmospheric pressure gradients, tides, river flow, short-crested wind-waves, and rainfall. An accurate numerical model of storm surge should account for all of these effects. Such a model can be used in predictive mode as storms approach landfall for the purposes of emergency evacuation and response, and can be used in the design and implementation of improved man-made and natural protection systems for vulnerable coastal areas. Storm surge computer models have been developed extensively over the past decade; however, only within the past few years have the algorithms, computational power and resolution been available to begin to model these events with any reasonable degree of accuracy.

 

Intellectual Merit: The goal of this project is to investigate the use of petascale computing to significantly advance the state-of-the-art in storm surge simulation, to accurately model flows at multiple, interacting scales, at resolution never before attempted, and to demonstrate that results from these simulations can be delivered in real-time to emergency managers. To achieve this goal will require the continued development and improved understand of the mechanisms involved in tightly coupled models of wind, waves, circulation and geomorphology, improvements in the description of the physical domain and adaptive resolution of all energetic flow scales, and investigation of accurate, robust and highly parallelizable numerical algorithms. Efficient implementation of these models on emerging petascale architectures will require utilizing the latest developments in parallel data management, real-time visualization, and programming tools.

 

In this project we will develop high resolution, large-scale coastal inundation models coupled with regional-scale rainfall/runoff models. Robust and highly parallelizable algorithms will be investigated for solving these systems on petascale architectures. The models will be implemented on NSF Track 2 HPC systems currently under construction; furthermore, implementation of the models on novel hybrid architectures will also be explored.

 

Broader impact: The broader impacts resulting from the proposed activity include the following:

1) The extension and application of the computational methodology and simulation tools to other problems in coastal engineering and marine science, including water quality, shipping and ports, marine ecology, naval operations, weather and climate, and wetland degradation.

 

2) Training of students and postdoctoral researchers directly involved in the research, and indirectly through courses, seminars and workshops.

 

3) Technology transfer and dissemination of results to government agencies such as FEMA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and NOAA, other universities in the United States and abroad, state and local agencies, and industry (e.g., the insurance industry).

 

4) The benefits of this research to other application areas involving coupled flow and transport defined on complex computational domains.