Application of Hydroinformatics: Topographic Sensitivity in Storm Surge Modeling
The National Water Center organizes Summer Institute every year which is a partnership between CUAHSI and the National Weather Service to engage the academic community in research to advance the mission of the National Water Center.
I participated in the Summer Institute in 2021 and worked with the Hydroinformatics cohort. It was intense, but one of the most interesting projects I have done so far. We were a group of three graduate students from the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Florida, and were mentored by the professor at Columbia University. Together, we worked remotely, communicating via zoom, and GitHub, on the CUHASI supercomputer resources in a project from scratch to finish in Hydroinformatics. Besides, we had four other groups that did their independent research. We also had weekly presentations which provided an opportunity to learn and provide feedback to the other groups.
In the project, we designed a framework to generate synthetic topography whose features can be systematically changed. The synthetic topography data was then fed to the storm surge model to estimate the magnitude and spatial extent of the coastal flood. We used GeoClaw, a python-based shallow-water equation solving computational fluid dynamics model to set up our project. The inputs to the model were preprocessed in GIS and the outputs were later post-processed in R programming language.
I presented our work at the AGU Fall 2021 meeting. See abstract here.
References:
- Wasti, A., Barrett, C., Alrehaili, M., Mandli, K., (2021, December). Creating a framework for determining the sensitivity of a storm surge model to topographic features and data resolution. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts (Vol. 2021).