Environmental hydrodynamic modeling applied to extreme events in Caribbean and Mediterranean countries.

There has been in recent years an increase in interest and concerns about natural disasters, both in the scientific community and the society, in relation to their frequency and intensity, the association to global warming, and cyclones (hurricanes and medicanes). In this work, two environmental hydrodynamics models are presented. The first model is built for Hurricane Irma that took place in 2017 in the Caribbean and the second for medicane Zorba that took place in 2018 in the Mediterranean Sea. The models were developed using downscaling techniques on the MOHID platform (a free open model developed for hydrodynamic solution). Water surface currents results are presented for regions of interest together with water level variations in Virtual Maregraphic Stations, “Isabella de Sagua” at Sagua de la Grande in Cuba, Key West in USA, Katacolon and “Kalamai” in Greece, all of them located in the trajectory of both cyclones. Promising results on the modeling of the interaction between water and the atmosphere aligned with available open-source data demonstrate the accuracy of inverse problem-based solutions for natural disaster modeling and its potential for drift simulation of floating objects in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]