Contributing to the Prediction of Coastal Flooding: Simulating Wave Heights and Directions along the Coast of Barrow, Alaska

• Other Authors: Kahn-Thornbrugh, Casey (author), Lynch, Amanda (contributor), Cassano, Elizabeth (contributor)
• Format: Manuscript
• Language: English
• Published: 2003
• Subjects: extreme weather events; storm surges; historical storms; SWAN; flood heights; wind speed; Barrow; Alaska
• Online Access: http://nldr.library.ucar.edu/repository/collections/SOARS-000-000-000-110; https://doi.org/10.5065/54m5-ts83

The community of Barrow, Alaska, Alaska has experienced coastal flooding during extreme weather events throughout events in the past 60 years. To improve the predictions of coastal flooding in coastal communities worldwide, models have been used to simulate flooding caused by storm surges. In many cases the coastal flood heights simulated by these coastal flooding models have been less than the flood heights that have been observed by the affected communities. The hypothesis for this project is that the results from coastal flooding models would be closer to observations if the contributions of waves to local sea level rise were taken into account. The Simulating Waves Nearshore (SWAN) model was used to simulate wave heights and directions offshore and in the Barrow coastal vicinity. Wind conditions from 11 historical storms and a recent storm (July 2003) were used as input data for SWAN. The wave simulations for the 11 historical storms showed wave development as a response to a constant wind speed and direction. The wave simulations for the July 2003 storm showed wave development as a response to the average wind speeds and directions every 6 hours. The output data for all the wave simulations consisted of wave height and direction distributions offshore and in the Barrow coastal vicinity. The resulting wave height data compared quite well to community recollections of the coastal wave heights. In a future application, these wave heights will be incorporated into coastal flooding models to test the contribution of waves to coastal flooding in Barrow.