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Compound flooding, the concurrence of multiple flooding mechanisms such as storm surge, heavy rainfall, and riverine flooding, poses a significant threat to coastal communities. To mitigate the impacts of compound flooding, forecasts must represent the variability of flooding drivers over a wide range of spatial scales while remaining timely. One approach to develop these forecasts is through subgrid corrections, which utilize information at smaller scales to "correct" water levels and current velocities averaged over the model scale. Recent studies have shown that subgrid models can improve both accuracy and efficiency; however, existing models are not able to account for the dynamic interactions of hydrologic and hydrodynamic drivers and their contributions to flooding along the smallest flow pathways when using a coarse resolution. Here, we have developed a solver called CoaSToRM (Coastal Subgrid Topography Research Model) with subgrid corrections to compute compound flooding in coastal systems resulting from fluvial, pluvial, tidal, and wind-driven processes. A key contribution is the model's ability to enforce all flood drivers and use the subgrid corrections to improve the accuracy of the coarse-resolution simulation. The model is validated for Hurricane Eta 2020 in Tampa Bay, showing improved prediction accuracy with subgrid corrections at 42 locations. Subgrid models with coarse resolutions (R2 = 0.70, 0.73, 0.77 for 3-, 1.5-, 0.75-km grids) outperform standard counterparts (R2 = 0.03, 0.14, 0.26). A 3-km subgrid simulation runs roughly 50 times faster than a 0.75-km subgrid simulation, with similar accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work examines tsunami run-up processes within a building array partially sheltered by a high-elevation, finite length, seawall. Work was performed using numerical modeling of 2D shallow water equations with varying seawall length, wave height, time scale, and structure size. Inundation depth and flow velocity were output at many locations of interest throughout the structural array. The most important influence on results when compared to the no-wall case was the sheltering or clearance angle as defined from the end of the wall. Behind the wall, inundation depth and cross-shore velocity declined significantly as sheltering angles increased (more sheltered). Alongshore inundation velocity (parallel to the seawall) increased strongly with increasing sheltering angle. A longer wave time scale resulted in significant increase in inundation depth and velocity especially at locations sheltered by the wall. Larger structure size or blockage ratio also led to increased inundation depth and flow velocity. However, varying wave height gave little change in inundation and velocity patterns. These results will serve to provide a better understanding of the wave inundation within a coastal urban region in a tsunami event when the seawall is breached, as well as the influence of coastal structure size and spacing on the tsunami inundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inundation models represent coastal regions with a grid of computational points, often with varying resolution of flow pathways and barriers. Models based on coarse grid solutions of shallow water equations have been improved recently via the use of subgrid corrections, which account for information (ground surface elevations, roughness characteristics) at smaller scales. In this work, numerical approaches of an established storm surge model are extended to include subgrid corrections. In an attempt to maintain continuity with existing users and results, model extensions were limited to those needed to provide basic subgrid capabilities, and included two major additions. First, a finite volume method is used to incorporate corrections to the mass and momentum equations using high-resolution ground surface elevations. Second, the no-slip condition imposed on the B-grid wet/dry interface in the model is modified to a slip condition to enable flows in channels with widths comparable to cell size. Numerical results demonstrate these numerical extensions can significantly enhance the accuracy of the model's predictions of coastal flooding, with low additional computational cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oceanic tides are seldom represented in Earth System Models (ESMs) owing to the need for high horizontal resolution to accurately represent the associated barotropic waves close to coasts. This paper presents results of tides implemented in the Model for Prediction Across Scales-Ocean or MPAS-Ocean, which is the ocean component within the US Department of Energy developed Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). MPAS-Ocean circumvents the limitation of low resolution using unstructured global meshing. We are at this stage simulating the largest semidiurnal (M2, S2, N2) and diurnal (K1, O1) tidal constituents in a single layer version of MPAS-O. First, we show that the tidal constituents calculated using MPAS-Ocean closely agree with TPXO8 results when suitably tuned topographic wave drag and bottom drag coefficients are employed. Thereafter, we present the sensitivity of global tidal evolution due to the presence of Antarctic ice shelf cavities. The effect of ice shelves on the amplitude and phase of tidal constituents are presented. Lower values of complex errors (with respect to TPX08 results) for the M2 tidal constituents are observed when ice shelf is added in the simulations, with particularly strong improvement in the Southern Ocean. Our work points towards future research with varying Antarctic ice shelf geometries and sea ice coupling that might lead to better comparison and prediction of tides, and thus better prediction of sea-level rise and also the future climate variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An adaptive wavelet-based method provides an alternative means to refine grids according to local demands of the physical solution. One of the prominent challenges of such a method is the application to problems defined on complex domains. In the case of incompressible flow, the application to problems with complicated domains is made possible by the use of the Navier-Stokes--Brinkman equations. These equations take into account solid obstacles by adding a penalized velocity term in the momentum equation. In this study, an adaptive wavelet collocation method, based on interpolating wavelets, is first applied to a benchmark problem defined on a simple domain to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the method. Then the penalty technique is used to simulate flows over obstacles. The numerical results are compared to those obtained by other computational approaches as well as to experiments. [DOI: 10.1115/1.1949650]

This paper details and tests numerical improvements to ADCIRC, a widely used finite element method shallow water equation solver, to more accurately and efficiently model global storm tides with seamless local mesh refinement in storm landfall locations. The sensitivity to global unstructured mesh design was investigated using automatically generated triangular meshes with a global minimum element size (MinEle) that ranged from 1.5 km to 6 km. We demonstrate that refining resolution based on topographic seabed gradients and employing a MinEle less than 3 km is important for the global accuracy of the simulated astronomical tide. Our recommended global mesh design (MinEle = 1.5 km) based on these results was locally refined down to two separate MinEle (500 m and 150 m) at the coastal landfall locations of two intense storms (Hurricane Katrina and Super Typhon Haiyan) to demonstrate the model's capability for coastal storm tide simulations and to test the sensitivity to local mesh refinement. Simulated maximum storm tide elevations closely follow the lower envelope of observed high water marks (HWMs) measured near the coast. In general, peak storm tide elevations along the open coast are decreased and the timing of the peak occurs later with local coastal mesh refinement. However, this mesh refinement only has a significant positive impact on HWM errors in straits and inlets narrower than the MinEle, and in bays and lakes separated from the ocean by these passages. Lastly, we demonstrate that the computational performance of the new numerical treatment is one-to-two orders of magnitude faster than studies using previous ADCIRC versions because gravity-wave based stability constraints are removed allowing for larger computational time steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]