Dr. Clint Dawson - Coastal Resilience Center

University of Texas at Austin

Project Name:

Accurate and Fast Spectral Wave Modeling and Coupling with ADCIRC

Other Research Participants/Partners:

Don Resio, University of North Florida, and Casey Dietrich, North Carolina State University

Project Description:

The ADCIRC coastal circulation and storm surge modeling system has been optimized for large-scale parallel computing hardware and has shown to be scalable up to thousands of processing cores. Given meteorological and tidal information, ADCIRC (ignoring wave physics) can produce a five-day prediction of water levels and velocities within a reasonable time frame for decision-makers, usually 15-30 minutes. With enough computing resources, ensembles of model runs can also be performed to account for uncertainty, e.g., for forecasting applications. The first goal of this project is to improve physics of wave models to increase both the accuracy and efficiency of storm surge predictions. The wave model developed by Resio et al will be tested and encapsulated for incorporation into the ADCIRC Prediction System™ (APS™). The second goal of this project is to incorporate and test the new wave physics within the APS™. ADCIRC developers are working with a team at NOAA to develop a coupled ADCIRC/WaveWatchIII (WWIII) model using the NUOPC framework. We will build upon this framework in this phase of the project.

Project Abstract

Research Interests:

Numerical methods for partial differential equations, specifically flow and transport problems in CFD; scientific computing and parallel computing; finite element analysis, discontinuous Galerkin methods; shallow water systems, hurricane storm surge modeling, rainfall-induced flooding; ground water systems, flow in porous media, geochemistry; data assimilation, parameter estimation, uncertainty and error estimation.