Coastal Storm Hazards from Virginia to Maine

• Main Authors: Nadal-Caraballo, Nornerto C, Melby, Jeffrey A, Gonzalez, Victor M, Cox, Andrew T
• Other Authors: ENGINEER RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTER VICKSBURG MS COASTAL AND HYDRAULICS LAB
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Meteorology; Physical and Dynamic Oceanography; Statistics and Probability; *COASTAL REGIONS; *NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN; *OCEAN MODELS; *TROPICAL CYCLONES; ATMOSPHERICS; BAROMETRIC PRESSURE; BASINS(GEOGRAPHIC); CLIMATOLOGY; COMPUTATIONS; FLOODING; HAZARDS; HURRICANES; OCEAN WAVES; PROBABILITY; RISK ANALYSIS; SAMPLING; SEA LEVEL; SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION; STATISTICAL ANALYSIS; STORMS; TEST AND EVALUATION; TIDES; UNCERTAINTY; VIRGINIA; VULNERABILITY; WATERSHEDS; NACCS(NORTH ATLANTIC COAST COMPREHENSIVE STUDY); COASTAL STORM HAZARDS; EXTRATROPICAL CYCLONES; EXTREME VALUE ANALYSIS; EXTREME WATER LEVEL; JPA(JOINT PROBABILITY ANALYSIS); JPM(JOINT PROBABILITY METHOD); OPTIMAL SAMPLING; STROM SURGE; SYNTHETIC STORMS; WAVE CLIMATE; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA627157; http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA627157

The U.S. North Atlantic coast is subject to coastal flooding as a result of tropical cyclones (e.g., hurricanes) and severe extratropical cyclones (e.g., Nor'easters). The North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive Study (NACCS) seeks to quantify existing and future forcing for use in assessing potential engineering projects that would reduce flooding risk and increase resiliency. The study encompasses the coastal region from Virginia to Maine. This report describes the characterization of storm climate and statistical analysis of coastal storm hazards for the NACCS. The overall NACCS wave and water level modeling goals included simulating an efficient number of storms that blanketed a sufficient range of storm characteristics in order to accurately describe the statistical nature of coastal storm response over the entire region. This information is required for modern probabilistic project design and for risk assessments. For this study, storm surge, tide, waves, wind, atmospheric pressure, and currents were the dominant storm responses computed. The effect of sea level change on these storm responses was assessed. The significant advancements in this study included a dense spatial coverage of nearshore storm response for the region, high-fidelity computations, a comprehensive description of the aleatory variability of response from frequent storm events to extremely rare events, a description of epistemic uncertainty, characterization of the statistical nature of the data in easily ingestible, relatively simple data formats, and public distribution of data and statistics within the Coastal Hazards System, a web-based coastal storm data resource. Prepared in collaboration with Oceanweather, Inc., Cos Cob, CT. The original document contains color images.