Surge Generation Mechanisms in the Lower Mississippi River and Discharge Dependency
Publication: Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
Volume 139, Issue 4
Abstract
The Lower Mississippi River protrudes into the Gulf of Mexico, and manmade levees line only the west bank for 55 km of the Lower Plaquemines section. Historically, sustained easterly winds from hurricanes have directed surge across Breton Sound, into the Mississippi River and against its west bank levee, allowing for surge to build and then propagate efficiently upriver and thus increase water levels past New Orleans. This case study applies a new and extensively validated basin- to channel-scale, high-resolution, unstructured-mesh ADvanced CIRCulation model to simulate a suite of historical and hypothetical storms under low to high river discharges. The results show that during hurricanes, (1) total water levels in the lower river south of Pointe à La Hache are only weakly dependent on river flow, and easterly wind-driven storm surge is generated on top of existing ambient strongly flow-dependent river stages, so the surge that propagates upriver reduces with increasing river flow; (2) natural levees and adjacent wetlands on the east and west banks in the Lower Plaquemines capture storm surge in the river, although not as effectively as the manmade levees on the west bank; and (3) the lowering of manmade levees along this Lower Plaquemines river section to their natural state, to allow storm surge to partially pass across the Mississippi River, will decrease storm surge upriver by 1 to 2 m between Pointe à La Hache and New Orleans, independent of river flow.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Bunya, S., et al. (2010). “A high resolution coupled riverine flow, tide, wind, wind wave and storm surge model for Southern Louisiana and Mississippi: Part I Model development and validation.” Mon. Weather Rev., 138(2), 345–377.
Cardone, V. J., Cox, A. T., and Forristall, G. Z. (2007). “OTC 18652: Hindcast of winds, waves and currents in northern Gulf of Mexico in Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Rita (2005).” 2007 Offshore Technology Conf., May 2007, Offshore Technology Conference, Houston.
COE. (2009). Hydraulics and hydrology appendix. Louisiana coastal protection and restoration: Final technical report, U.S. Army Engineer District, New Orleans.
Cox, A. T., Greenwood, J. A., Cardone, V. J., and Swail, V. R. (1995). “An interactive objective kinematic analysis system.” Fourth Int. Workshop on Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting, Banff, AB, Canada, Atmospheric Environment Service, 109–118.
Dawson, C., Westerink, J. J., Feyen, J. C., and Pothina, D. (2006). “Continuous, discontinuous and coupled discontinuous-continuous Galerkin Finite Element Methods for the shallow water equations.” Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids, 52(1), 63–88.
de Jong, W., Westerink, J., and van Ledden, M. (2007). “The influence of Lower Plaquemines Parish Mississippi River levees on storm surge in Southern Louisiana.” Proc., 10th Int. Workshop of Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting & Coastal Hazard Symposium, World Meteorological Society, North Shore, HI.
Dietrich, J. C., et al. (2010). “A high resolution coupled riverine flow, tide, wind, wind wave and storm surge model for Southern Louisiana and Mississippi: Part II - Synoptic description and analyses of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.” Mon. Weather Rev., 138(2), 378–404.
Dietrich, J. C., et al. (2011). “Hurricane Gustav (2008) waves and storm surge: Hindcast, synoptic analysis and validation in Southern Louisiana.” Mon. Weather Rev., 139(8), 2488–2522.
Dietrich, J. C., et al. (2012). “Performance of the Unstructured-Mesh, SWAN+ADCIRC Model in computing hurricane waves and surge.” J. Sci. Comput., 52(2), 468–497.
Ebersole, B. A., Westerink, J. J., Resio, D. T., and Dean, R. G. (2007). Performance evaluation of the New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana hurricane protection system, Vol. IV – The storm. Final report of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, Unites States Army Corps of Engineers, Washington, DC.
Ebersole, B. A., Westerink, J. J., Bunya, S., Dietrich, J. C., and Cialone, M. A. (2010). “Development of storm surge which led to flooding in St. Bernard Polder during Hurricane Katrina.” Ocean Eng., 37(1), 91–103.
FEMA. (2009). Flood insurance study: Southeastern parishes, Louisiana: Offshore water levels and waves, United States Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District, New Orleans.
Humphreys, A. A., and Abbot, H. L. (1867). Report upon the physics and hydraulics of the Mississippi River; upon the protection of the Alluvial region against overflow; and upon the deepening of the mouths, Bureau of Topographical Engineers, War Department, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.
Kennedy, A. B., et al. (2011). “Origin of the Hurricane Ike forerunner surge.” Geophys. Res. Lett., 38(8), L08608.
Link, L.E., et al. (2008). Performance evaluation of the New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana hurricane protection system, Vol. I – Executive summary and overview. Draft final report of the Interagency Performance Task Force, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Washington, DC.
Luettich, R. A., and Westerink, J. J. (2004). “Formulation and numerical implementation of the 2D/3D ADCIRC finite element model version 44.XX.” 〈http://adcirc.org/adcirc_theory_2004_12_08.pdf〉 (Jul. 23, 2009).
Martyr, R. C. et al. (2013).“Simulating hurricane storm surge in the lower Mississippi River under varying flow conditions.” J. Hydraul. Eng., 139(5), 492–501.
Pabis, G. S. (1998). “Delaying the deluge. The engineering debate over flood control on the lower Mississippi River, 1846-1861.” J. South. Hist., 64(3), 421–454.
Powell, M., Houston, S., Amat, L., and Morrisseau-Leroy, N. (1998). “The HRD real-time hurricane wind analysis system.” J. Wind Eng. Ind. Aerodyn., 77-78, 53–64.
Powell, M., Houston, S., and Reinhold, T. (1996). “Hurricane Andrew's landfall in South Florida. Part I: Standardizing measurements for documentation of surface windfields.” Weather Forecast., 11(3), 304–328.
Resio, D. T. (2007). White paper on estimating hurricane inundation probabilities. U.S. Army Engineering Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, MS.
Resio, D. T., and Westerink, J. J. (2008). “Hurricanes and the physics of surges.” Phys. Today, 61(9), 33–38.
Rogers, J. D. (2008). “Development of the New Orleans Flood Protection System prior to Hurricane Katrina.” J. Geotech. Geoenviron. Eng., 134(5), 602–617.
Stone, G. W., Grymes, J. M., Dingler, J. R., and Pepper, D. A. (1997). “Overview and significance of hurricanes on the Louisiana coast, U.S.A.” J. Coast. Res., 13(3), 656–669.
Tanaka, S., Bunya, S., Westerink, J. J., Dawson, C., and Luettich, R. A. (2011). “Scalability of an unstructured grid continuous Galerkin based hurricane storm surge model.” J. Sci. Comput., 46(3), 329–358.
Tompkins, F. R. (1901). Riparian lands of the Mississippi River, past–present–prospective, A.L. Swift & Co., Chicago.
Van De Waart, M. (2009). “Plaquemines spillways – The impact of the lower Mississippi River levee on storm surge during hurricanes.” Ph.D. thesis, 〈http://essay.utwente.nl/58648/〉.
Van de Waart, M., van Ledden, M., de Jong, W., Hulscher, S., Mulder, J., and Westerink, J. (2010). “Overlaten alternatief voor dijkverhoging in New Orleans.” H20, 43(7), 17–19 (in Dutch).
Westerink, J. J., et al. (2008). “A basin-to channel-scale unstructured grid hurricane storm surge model applied to southern Louisiana.” Monthly Weather Review, 136(3), 833–864.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
Volume 139 • Issue 4 • July 2013
Pages: 326 - 335
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 3, 2012
Accepted: Sep 26, 2012
Published online: Sep 29, 2012
Published in print: Jul 1, 2013
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.