New Developments in the ADCIRC Community Model

A substantial number of new capabilities and community building activities have been developed for the ADCIRC coastal circulation and storm surge model. The new capabilities include the ability to specify 11 properties (nodal attributes) for desired nodes in the model grid, to generate symmetric or asymmetric parametric hurricane wind and pressure forcing from best track formatted input files, to activate a dynamically adaptive spatially/temporally varying weighting factor τ₀ in the Generalized Wave-Continuity Equation (GWCE), and to select among different output options, including netCDF on an unstructured grid. Examples that show the impact these enhancements can make in a typical ADCIRC simulation are presented. New utilities have also been developed to address specific needs of ADCIRC users. In particular, a preprocessing tool to create nodal attributes from the USGS National Land Cover Database and an ADCIRC-to-ArcGIS format conversion tool, which extracts a geographical subdomain and time window from model output fields, have been developed to encourage broader usage of ADCIRC datasets in inundation mapping, evacuation planning and other GIS applications. The content of the adcirc.org website continues to be expanded as a resource for community information and products related to ADCIRC.