Coupling a High Resolution Hurricane Storm Surge Model to Operational Weather and Ocean Prediction Systems

The NOAA National Ocean Service Coast Survey Development Laboratory is partnering with NOAA's National Weather Service National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) to investigate an integrated prediction system of weather, storm surge, and inundation. These initial investigations are aimed for routine operations at NOAA. For that purpose, NCEP operational weather-ocean forecast systems are interfaced to a high resolution Coastal Flood Model (CFM). The model used to develop a high resolution CFM is the ADvanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC) finite element model. The ADCIRC hydrodynamic model has several features beneficial for this application and has been demonstrated to be effective at predicting water levels in complex coastal systems. Its unstructured grid methodology can not only propagate the hurricane-generated storm surge wave from offshore, across the shelf, and inland, but also can readily and accurately represent irregular shoreline and coastal topographic features, including barrier islands, rivers and waterways. In the approach illustrated here, a high resolution CFM of the North Carolina sound system is used to examine the impact of meteorological forcing from a suite of NOAA models. The meteorological forcings (e.g. the hurricane wind and pressure fields) being tested include the H*Wind hurricane wind analysis system, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Hurricane Model, and the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) Model. The test cases are focused on simulating Hurricane Isabel (2003).