Coupling of Meteorology, Ocean, and Nearshore Models for Predicting Coastal Inundation along Delaware's Coast

In this study, we couple the meteorology model — WRF, the regional ocean circulation model — ROMS, the wave generation and propagation model — SWAN, and the nearshore community model — NearCoM for use in predicting coastal inundation along Delaware's coast. The computational domains include two large-scale domains and several small-scale nearshore domains. A large-scale domain used by WRF covers much of eastern North America and adjacent Atlantic Ocean. SWAN and ROMS use a regional ocean-scale domain, covering the entire Delaware Bay and adjacent Atlantic Ocean. The small-scale domains include several economically valuable and storm vulnerable coastal regions along Delaware's coast and are used by NearCoM. The model-coupling framework is developed in a parallel computational environment based on a two-way coupling scheme though the coupling between different scale models is one-way coupling in applications. The paper presents some results from an application to coupling of three model components, i.e., SWAN, ROMS and NearCoM, for predictions of waves, tide currents, nearshore circulations, storm surges and coastal inundations in Delaware Bay and Inland Bays.