Steps towards Modeling Community Resilience under Climate Change: Hazard Model Development

Abstract

With a growing population (over 40%) living in coastal counties within the U.S., there is an increasing risk that coastal communities will be significantly impacted by riverine/coastal flooding and high winds associated with tropical cyclones. Climate change could exacerbate these risks; thus, it would be prudent for coastal communities to plan for resilience in the face of these uncertainties. In order to address all of these risks, a coupled physics-based modeling system has been developed that simulates total water levels. This system uses parametric models for both rainfall and wind, which only require essential information (e.g., track and central pressure) generated by a hurricane model. The system is validated with Hurricane Isabel hindcasts: One using the parametric system and another using data assimilated fields. The results show a good agreement to the available data, indicating that the system is able to adequately capture the hazards using parametric models, as compared to optimized fields. The validated system was then utilized to simulate randomly generated scenarios that account for future uncertainty, i.e., amount of sea level rise and storm strength/track, as influenced by projected climate change scenarios. Results are then used in next step in the development of a system-wide, community resilience model. with the Houston area experiencing approximately 36 to 48 inches total during the storm. As well, some of the cities along the Texas/Louisiana border received over 60 inches. All of the rain caused many of the rivers within the Houston metro areas to exceed their banks and lead to record flood stages on Clear Creek, Dickinson Bayou, Buffalo Bayou and Cypress Creek [1].Hurricane Irma followed Hurricane Harvey by a couple of weeks and made landfall in Florida. Similar to Harvey, Irma produced damages that were caused by wind and flooding due to both storm surge and rainfall. Irma affected the Florida Keys most significantly with almost 25% of the buildings on the Keys destroyed during the storm and almost 90% of the structures sustaining damage [2]. Throughout several counties of Florida, Irma destroyed structures and caused significant power failures. Furthermore, the storm had a devastating effect on the agricultural crops, e.g., it was estimated that approximately $760 million in damage was done to the orange groves in the southwestern and central parts of Florida [2]. Heavy rainfall occurred as Irma moved into the northern portions of Florida leading to significant flooding with rivers reaching, and some exceeding, previously recorded flood stages in nine different counties: Bradford, Clay, Marion, Flagler, Duval, Putnam, St. Johns, Nassau and Alachua [2].Hurricane Maria was the most devastating hurricane to make landfall on any of the Caribbean islands in almost 80 years. Reports from the island nation of Dominica indicated that a majority of the structures on the island were either seriously damaged or destroyed as a result of the storm. In fact, Pasch et al. [3] indicated that the Prime M...

Development and Validation of Accumulation Term (Distributed and/or Point Source) in a Finite Element Hydrodynamic Model

“…This is not a true "total water level" simulation, as waves were not included; however, as the focus of this study is to provide general proof of concept and validation of the methodology rather than a true hindcast validation of the near-shore coastal response, the lack of wave physics will not alter the results significantly. Previous studies have shown that waves are more influential in the near-shore tidal zone and do not often travel upriver much beyond the tidal limit except in cases of extreme storm surge [23,45]. Therefore, the lack of waves will mostly affect the comparisons at the NOS stations but should have little to no bearing on the inland USGS results.…”

“…Previous work [23,45] has looked at connecting a hydrologic and hydrodynamic model in the North Carolina coast in the Tar-Neuse Pamlico areas. In particular, this work examined the behavior for the main stems of four different riverine areas in North Carolina: Tar and Neuse Rivers and Fishing and Contentnea Creeks but it did not include precipitation.…”

“…The hydrodynamic model utilized within this manuscript, called ADCIRC (ADvanced CIRCulation) [22], currently uses a riverine boundary condition with streamflow information input from a separate hydrology model. Within this framework, ADCIRC has been successfully coupled to hydrologic models and applied in the study of both hindcasts of historical storms [6,7] and future climate predictions [23]. While this does introduce the main upland riverine streamflows into the coastal zone, it does not capture the rainfallrunoff that occurs downstream of those connections, which can lead to missing surface runoff (lateral inflows), nor does it capture the actual precipitation in the coastal areas.…”

A review of flash‐floods management: From hydrological modeling to crisis management

“…Out of the 72 articles corresponding to query 4, more than half of the articles (39) were excluded from the criteria analysis (Section 3.2) (Alipour et al, 2020;Azam et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2019;Chu et al, 2022;Ciavola et al, 2018;Davies, 2015;Ding & Fang, 2019;Dresback et al, 2019;Habibi et al, 2021;Han & Sharif, 2021;Hofmann & Schüttrumpf, 2019;Ibarreche et al, 2020;Jha & Afreen, 2020;Jubach & Tokar, 2016;Kellens et al, 2013;Khan et al, 2018;Kim & Han, 2020;Kruczkiewicz et al, 2021;Li et al, 2022;Liu, Shi, & Fang, 2022;Liu, Zhou, et al, 2022;Lo et al, 2015;Munawar, Hammad, & Waller, 2021;Munawar, Ullah, et al, 2021;Nakamura & Morioka, 2019;Ngo et al, 2018;Nguyen et al, 2021;Perera et al, 2020;Pielke et al, 2021;Prikryl et al, 2021;Rasquinho et al, 2013;Saravi et al, 2019;Smith & Rodriguez, 2017;Stamellou et al, 2021;Tammar et al, 2020;Tariq et al, 2022;Wang, Chen, et al, 2021;Wang, Kong, et al, 2021;…”