Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Graham, Lindley.
This report provides a description of the tasks undertaken and results and accomplishments obtained by the University of South Carolina/Florida State University team participating in the project.
There are many multiple scale issues in the ocean modeling, including different mesh resolutions (local) and different physical processes (global). In order to gain efficiency and fidelity in modern ESMs, it is vital to develop high quality, highly nonuniform meshes and spatially-dependent time stepping strategies for coupling various climate system components. The USC/FSU team has worked on the design, analysis, and implementation of fast CVT grid generation and novel time- stepping schemes that could address all the requirements for global and regional ocean models on highly nonuniform meshes.
The majority of structural damage and loss of life during a hurricane is due to storm surge, thus it is important for communities in hurricane-prone regions to understand their risk due to surge. Storm surge in particular is largely influenced by coastal features such as topography/bathymetry and bottom roughness. Bottom roughness determines how much resistance there is to the flow. Manning’s formula can be used to model the bottom stress with the Manning’s n coefficient, a spatially dependent field. Given a storm surge model and a set of model outputs, an inverse problem may be solved to determine probable Manning’s n fields to use for predictive simulations. The inverse problem is formulated and solved in a measure-theoretic framework using the state-of-the-art Advanced Circulation (ADCIRC) storm surge model. The use of measure theory requires minimal assumptions and involves the direct inversion of the physics-based map from model inputs to output data determined by the ADCIRC model. Thus, key geometric relationships in this map are preserved and exploited. By using a recently available subdomain implementation of ADCIRC that significantly reduces the computational cost of forward model solves, the authors demonstrate the method on a case study using data obtained from an ADCIRC hindcast study of Hurricane Gustav (2008) to quantify uncertainties in Manning’s n within Bay St. Louis. However, the methodology is general and could be applied to any inverse problem that involves a map from model input to output quantities of interest.