Skip to main content

Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Geospatial Forum with Dr. Casey Dietrich

October 18, 2018 @ 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Emergency managers rely on fast and accurate storm surge predictions from numerical models to make decisions and estimate damages during storm events. One of the challenges for such models is providing a high level of resolution along the coast without significantly increasing the computational time. Models with large domains, such as the Advanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC) model used in this study, are accurate in predicting water levels and their variation in complex coastal regions, however their spatial resolution may limit their predictions of flooding at the scale of buildings, roadways, and critical infrastructure. A new tool has been developed that uses Geographic Information System (GIS) scripts to enhance the resolution of maximum water level predictions at the boundary of predicted flooding using a high-resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM). The water levels predicted by the lower resolution model are extrapolated outward to where the water would intersect with the higher resolution elevation dataset. The result is a highly-refined flooding boundary that represents inundation on scales smaller than the typical ADCIRC mesh resolution. This tool can process a 15-m DEM for all 32 coastal counties of the state of North Carolina in less than 15 minutes during a storm event. Comparison of results using spatial building datasets showed that for a simulation of Hurricane Matthew, 2,353 buildings were predicted to be flooded in Carteret County, NC prior to enhancing resolution, and 3,298 post-enhancement, an increase of 40 percent. In Dare County, the increase was 22 percent. This dramatic increase in flooded buildings shows the importance of achieving high accuracy in floodplains, as a relatively small change in predicted flooding extent can have a substantial impact on the predicted number of flooded buildings. The validity of these results was tested via comparisons to results of an ADCIRC model with the same 15-m resolution as the DEM in Dare County. Dare County is a coastal region with widely-varying topography and land cover, and preliminary comparisons have shown that the GIS method is accurate in coastal regions with steeper slopes and less accurate in flatter, low-lying areas.

Details

Date:
October 18, 2018
Time:
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Event Category:
Website:
geospatial.ncsu.edu/geospatial-forum

Venue

Jordan Hall 5103
2800 Faucette Drive
Raleigh, NC 27695 United States
+ Google Map