Discontinuous Galerkin methods for modeling Hurricane storm surge

Storm surge due to hurricanes and tropical storms can result in significant loss of life, property damage, and long-term damage to coastal ecosystems and landscapes. Computer modeling of storm surge can be used for two primary purposes: forecasting of surge as storms approach land for emergency planning and evacuation of coastal populations, and hindcasting of storms for determining risk, development of mitigation strategies, coastal restoration and sustainability.Storm surge is modeled using the shallow water equations, coupled with wind forcing and in some events, models of wave energy. In this paper, we will describe a depth-averaged (2D) model of circulation in spherical coordinates. Tides, riverine forcing, atmospheric pressure, bottom friction, the Coriolis effect and wind stress are all important for characterizing the inundation due to surge. The problem is inherently multi-scale, both in space and time. To model these problems accurately requires significant investments in acquiring high-fidelity input (bathymetry, bottom friction characteristics, land cover data, river flow rates, levees, raised roads and railways, etc.), accurate discretization of the computational domain using unstructured finite element meshes, and numerical methods capable of capturing highly advective flows, wetting and drying, and multi-scale features of the solution.The discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method appears to allow for many of the features necessary to accurately capture storm surge physics. The DG method was developed for modeling shocks and advection-dominated flows on unstructured finite element meshes. It easily allows for adaptivity in both mesh (h) and polynomial order (p) for capturing multi-scale spatial events. Mass conservative wetting and drying algorithms can be formulated within the DG method.In this paper, we will describe the application of the DG method to hurricane storm surge. We discuss the general formulation, and new features which have been added to the model to better capture surge in complex coastal environments. These features include modifications to the method to handle spherical coordinates and maintain still flows, improvements in the stability post-processing (i.e. slope-limiting), and the modeling of internal barriers for capturing overtopping of levees and other structures. We will focus on applications of the model to recent events in the Gulf of Mexico, including Hurricane Ike.     

校园人群应急疏散行为及其影响因素研究

校园作为城市高密度地区的典型区域,建筑密度高、道路错综曲折、灾后疏散难度大。以南京中心城区某高校为实证研究案例,展开问卷调查;采用皮尔逊卡方检验法,对校园人群安全意识及疏散行为和性别、年龄、受教育程度及参加疏散演练次数等人员特性信息进行交叉分析,得到存在相关性的变量组;基于Logistic回归模型,建立了人群特征、安全意识评价指标对校园人群疏散行为及心理影响的评价模型,识别疏散行为影响因素,以及各因素的影响程度大小。结果表明:年龄、性别以及参加过疏散演练的次数是影响人群安全意识及疏散行为的显著相关因素,学历是相关因素;地震灾害下受访人群对避难场所的选择偏好为:场地型避难场所>建筑型避难场所>地下空间;参加疏散演练的次数,安全意识、风险认知对灾害发生时的人群疏散行为有显著影响。     

Planning for Tsunami-Resilient Communities

The National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program (NTHMP) Steering Committee consists of representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the states of Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. The program addresses three major components: hazard assessment, warning guidance, and mitigation. The first two components, hazard assessment and warning guidance, are led by physical scientists who, using research and modeling methods, develop products that allow communities to identify their tsunami hazard areas and receive more accurate and timely warning information. The third component, mitigation, is led by the emergency managers who use their experience and networks to translate science and technology into user-friendly planning and education products. Mitigation activities focus on assisting federal, state, and local officials who must plan for and respond to disasters, and for the public that is deeply affected by the impacts of both the disaster and the pre-event planning efforts. The division between the three components softened as NTHMP scientists and emergency managers worked together to develop the best possible products for the users given the best available science, technology, and planning methods using available funds.     

Social memory and resilience in New Orleans

A key concept in resilience studies is that human societies can learn from hazard events and use their accumulated social memory to better contend with future catastrophes. This article explores the deliberate referral to historical records complied after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and how they were used to prepare for tropical storms at the time of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Despite proclamations that Louisiana would not repeat its mistakes, hazards planners seriously neglected the historical record.     

人群拥挤踩踏事件原因与应急处置探究: 上海外滩迎新踩踏事件的反思

重大突发灾害事故时有发生,给人民的生命财产安全带来了严重的威胁。应急疏散作为灾后应急响应的重要环节,对减少人员伤亡有着重要意义。经过长期发展,研究人员利用多种方式观察到了许多具有重要价值的疏散规律,也提出了多个优秀的模型方法。然而,应急疏散涉及到的灾害事故类型、受灾人群和应急场景等多样复杂,导致应急疏散模型的侧重点和方法论等各有不同,加大了读者对应急疏散研究现状的全局理解难度。从应急疏散行为分析、模拟仿真、策略优化、预案实施等多个角度对现有重大突发灾害事故下的应急疏散研究现状进行梳理、归纳与总结,旨在厘清一条清晰的应急疏散研究脉络。在此基础之上,进一步提炼出当前面临的主要难题与解决思路,服务于应急疏散的下一步发展。     

Addressing Hurricane Intensity through Angular Momentum and Scale Energetics Approaches

This paper addresses two avenues for gaining insight into the hurricane intensity issue—the angular momentum approach and the scale interaction approach. In the angular momentum framework, the torques acting on a parcel's angular momentum are considered along an inflowing trajectory in order to construct the angular momentum budget. These torques are separable into three components: The pressure torque, the surface friction torque, and the cloud torque. All torques are found to diminish the angular momentum of an inflowing parcel, with the cloud torques having the most important role. In the scale interaction approach, energy exchanges among different scales within a hurricane are considered as a means of understanding hurricane intensity. It is found that the majority of kinetic energy contribution to the hurricane scales originates from potential-to-kinetic in-scale energy conversions. The contribution of mean-wave interactions in the kinetic energy varies with distance from the center and with the life stage of a storm. In the early stages, as the disorganized convection becomes organized on the hurricane scales, upscale energy transfers (i.e., from small to large scale) are found to take place in the outer radii of the storm. In a mature storm, the kinetic energy transfers are downscale, except for the inner radii.     

飓风中的涡旋罗斯贝波

文中从柱坐标系下的正压无辐散涡度方程出发,用WKBJ方法求解方程,发现在飓风中存在类似于行星罗斯贝波的涡旋罗斯贝波,这种波的形成主要是由于飓风中基态涡度垂直分量的径向梯度所决定。利用一次飓风过程的精确数值模拟所输出高分辨的资料,计算了飓风中径向涡度梯度的分布,指出这类波动主要存在于眼墙和眼心中。波动结构分析表明,波动能量具有径向频散,这有可能是飓风暖心结构的一种形成机制。最后用波射线法讨论了定常涡旋罗斯贝波的径向频散     

A review of the climatological characteristics of landfalling Gulf hurricanes for wind, wave, and surge hazard estimation

The climatological characteristics of landfalling Gulf of Mexico hurricanes are presented, focusing on the basic parameters needed for accurately determining the structure and intensity of hurricanes for ocean response models. These include the maximum sustained wind, radius of maximum winds, the Holland-B parameter, the peripheral or far-field pressure, the surface roughness and coefficient of drag, and the central pressure for historical hurricanes in the Gulf.Despite evidence of a slight increase in the annual number of named storms over the past 50 years, presently there is no statistically significant trend in tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition, the long-term variability of tropical cyclones in the Gulf reflects the observed variability in the Atlantic basin as a whole. Analyses of hurricane winds from multiple sources suggest the presence of a bias toward overestimating the strength of winds in the HURDAT dataset from 7% to 15%. Results presented comparing HURDAT with other sources also show an overestimation of intensity at landfall, with an estimated bias of ~10%.Finally, a review of recent studies has shown that hurricane frequencies and intensities appear to vary on a much more localized scale than previously believed. This exacerbates the sampling problem for accurate characterization of hurricane parameters for design and operational applications.     

Controls on sediment evacuation from glacially modified and unmodified catchments in the eastern Sierra Nevada,California

The degree of glacial modification in small catchments along the eastern Sierra Nevada, California, controls the timing and pattern of sediment flux to the adjacent fans. There is a close relationship between the depth of fan‐head incision and the pattern and degree of Late Pleistocene catchment erosion by valley glaciers; catchments with significant glacial activity are associated with deeply incised fan heads, whereas fans emerging from glacially unmodified catchments are unincised. We suggest that the depth of fan‐head incision is controlled by the potential for sediment storage during relatively dry ice‐free periods, which in turn is related to the downstream length of the glacially modified valley and creation of accommodation through valley floor slope lowering and glacial valley overdeepening and widening. Significant storage in glacially modified basins during ice‐free periods leads to sediment supply‐limited conditions at the fan head and causes deep incision. In contrast, a lack of sediment trapping allows quasi‐continuous sediment supply to the fan and prevents incision of the fan head. Sediment evacuation rates should thus show large variations in glacially modified basins, with major peaks during glacial and lows during interglacial or ice‐free periods, respectively. In contrast, sediment removal from glacially unmodified catchments in this type of setting should be free of this effect, and will be dominated instead by short‐term variations, modulated for example by changes in vegetation cover or storm frequency. This distinction may help improve our understanding of long‐term sediment yields as a measure of erosional efficiency. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A real-time, event-triggered storm surge forecasting system for the state of North Carolina

A new real-time, event-triggered storm surge prediction system has been developed for the State of North Carolina to assist emergency managers, policy-makers and other government officials with evacuation planning, decision-making and resource deployment during tropical storm landfall and flood inundation events. The North Carolina Forecast System (NCFS) was designed and built to provide a rapid response assessment of hurricane threat, accomplished by driving a high-resolution, two-dimensional, depth-integrated version of the ADCIRC (Advanced Circulation) coastal ocean model with winds from a synthetic asymmetric gradient wind vortex. These parametric winds, calculated at exact finite-element mesh node locations and directly coupled to the ocean model at every time step, are generated from National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecast advisories the moment they are inserted into the real-time weather data stream, maximizing the number of hours of forecast utility. Tidal harmonic constituents are prescribed at the open water boundaries and applied as tidal potentials in the interior of the ocean model domain. A directional surface roughness parameterization that modulates the wind speed at a given location based on the types of land cover encountered upwind, a forest canopy sheltering effect, and a spatially varying distribution of Manning’s–n friction coefficient used for computing the bottom/channel bed friction are also included in the storm surge model. Comparisons of the simulated wind speeds and phases against their real meteorological counterparts, of model elevations against actual sea surface elevations measured by NOAA tide gauges along the NC coast, and of simulated depth-averaged current velocities against Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) data, indicate that this new system produces remarkably realistic predictions of winds and storm surge.