Florida's Intracoastal Waterway in a Storm Surge Setting: Longwave Physics and Mesh Resolution

This paper works toward the study of the longwave physics and mesh resolution needed for the modeling of storm surge in north Florida; namely, how to incorporate Florida's Intracoastal Waterway, which narrows and becomes highly constricted (only 100 m wide), into a finite element mesh that contains the full coastal domain, including the floodplain. Numerical storm surge experiments are conducted using various domain definitions (finite element meshes) of Florida's Intracoastal Waterway with Hurricane Dora (1964) as the test-case scenario. Questions examined in the paper are: (i) is there a frictional component to Florida's Intracoastal Waterway, that is, does the overall storm surge, as it's propagating over the Intracoastal and into the floodplain, feel any impact because of the Intracoastal's presence; and (ii) how does resolving Florida's Intracoastal Waterway in the finite element mesh affect simulated storm surge conveyance along the Intracoastal, and thus, transmission of storm surge to adjacent water bodies?