Before, during, and after events such as tropical storms, emergency managers, weather forecasters, GIS specialists, and modelers rely on visualizations and geospatial data to assess storm impacts. These users draw on observations from water-level stations as well as coastal and ocean models that simulate tides, winds, waves, and hurricane-driven storm surge.
We provide real time decision support services based on a powerful system that works with three components:
- The Coastal Emergency Risks Assessment (CERA) visualization tool
- The ADCIRC storm surge model coupled with the SWAN wave model
- The ADCIRC Surge Guidance System (ASGS)
The Coastal Emergency Risks Assessment (CERA) visualization and data-exploration platform (https://cera.coastalrisk.live ) provides emergency managers, decision-makers, researchers, and the public with access to observational data and numerical model results. Users can explore individual storms and their characteristics through interactive visualizations linked to the underlying models and datasets. By making storm-surge guidance accessible and understandable, CERA supports the assessment of coastal hazards and their potential impacts.
ADCIRC is a hydrodynamic model used to simulate tides, winds, storm surge, and coastal flooding associated with tropical storms and hurricanes. It can be coupled with the Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) model to incorporate wave effects and improve the representation of coastal water levels and flooding. ADCIRC is used in applications ranging from real-time storm-surge forecasting to the evaluation of coastal protection and restoration projects.
The ADCIRC Surge Guidance System (ASGS) supports the automated execution of ADCIRC simulations on high-performance computing systems. It enables real-time storm-surge guidance and other decision-support applications for public-sector agencies and coastal communities along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
During tropical storm events, model guidance is computed at the Louisiana State University High Performance Center (LSU HPC), the LONI Network (Louisiana State University), and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC – University of Texas).
