Coastal Science and Coastal Resilience

Abstract:  

Globally and within the United States, the past two – three decades have witnessed a significant increase in major disasters due to severe coastal storms. The impacts of these events have been magnified by rapid population growth in areas such as the US Gulf and southeast Atlantic coasts that are susceptible to the strongest of these storms, tropical cyclones. Climate change has and will continue to elevate the effects, most notably due to sea level rise and the generation of more virulent storms. Risk mitigation planning and design, insurance rates and emergency response activities in vulnerable coastal areas depend on the predictive capabilities of coastal flood hazard models.

This same period has seen a substantial advancement in coastal hazard modeling. During this period, I’ve worked on the development and community building of the ADCIRC coastal hazards model. As an early adopter of unstructured mesh numerical techniques, ADCIRC’s robust capabilities for modeling flows in highly complex coastal environs plus the expanding need for coastal hazard prediction capabilities have propelled it to the forefront of the field. Since that time ADCIRC has continued to evolve its representation of coastal hazard hydrodynamics and has been widely used in retrospective, statistical, design and forecast applications. In this talk I will provide a brief overview of ADCIRC applications in coastal hazard studies as well as examples of ongoing development to extend ADCIRC’s capabilities for modeling compound flooding and damage assessment.

Bio:

Dr. Luettich is a coastal physical oceanographer whose research deals with modeling and measurement of circulation and transport in coastal waters. He is a co-developer of the ADCIRC coastal circulation and storm surge model – widely used for coastal flooding studies by academia, the private sector and multiple federal agencies including: the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Coast Guard.