Efficient Strategies for the Joint Probability Evaluation of Storm Surge Hazards

This paper describes the concepts, testing, and application of efficient ways to apply the Joint Probability Method (JPM) for storm surge frequency analysis. Two optimization methods which substantially reduce the number of storm simulations needed to complete a JPM analysis are introduced. These were independently developed during two concurrent studies on the northern Gulf of Mexico; the methods are here applied to a common set of historic storm data for the Mississippi coast. The optimized methods are compared to each other and evaluated against a more rigorous reference standard, using a highly efficient surge model as a diagnostic tool. The results show that both optimization methods are capable of greatly reducing the number of numerical simulations required to reproduce the reference standard results with good accuracy.