Storm Surge

Overview

Natural disasters such as hurricanes heavily impact the United States’ East and Gulf coasts. This creates the need for large-scale modeling in the areas of meteorology and ocean sciences, coupled with an integrated environment for analysis and information dissemination. In turn, there is an increased need for large-scale, distributed, high-performance resources and data environments.

This visualization shows how a supercomputer coupled with a high-speed network can provide insight and decision-support on how hurricane storm sturge affects the North Carolina coast.

Quote from Real-time Storm Surge Ensemble Modeling in a Grid Environment:

“Year after year, the US East and Gulf coasts are heavily impacted by hurricane activity causing large number of deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses. For example in 2005, there were 14 hurricanes, exceeding the record of 12 in 1969, out of which 7 were considered major hurricanes. To help reduce the impact of hurricanes, there is a need for an integrated response system that enables virtual communities to evaluate, plan and react to such natural phenomena. The integrated system needs to handle real-time data feeds, schedule and execute a set of model runs, manage the model input and output data, make results and status available to the larger audience. In addition, to enhance the scientific validity of the models there is a need to be able to recreate scenarios and re-run the models for retrospective analysis. The large-scale modeling and analysis has driven the use of high performance resources and Grid environments for such problems.”

Project Team

  • Howard Lander
  • Brian Blanton

Collaborators

Jeff White, Ph.D., assistant professor, NC State University department of soil science