A high-performance, parallel, and hierarchically distributed model for coastal run-up events simulation and forecasting

Abstract

The request for quickly available forecasts of intense weather and marine events impacting coastal areas is gradually increasing. High-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence techniques are crucial in this application. Risk mitigation and coastal management must design scientific workflow appropriately and maintain them continuously updated and operational. Climate change accelerating increase trend of the past decades impacted on sea-level rise, together with broader factors such as geostatic effects and subsidence, reducing the effectiveness of coastal defenses. Due to this, the support tools, such as Early Warning Systems, have become increasingly more valuable because they can process data promptly and provide valuable indications for mitigation proposals. We developed the Shoreline Alert Model (SAM), an operational Python tool that produces simulation scenarios, ‘what-if’ assumptions, and coastal flooding forecasts to fill this gap in our study area. SAM aims to provide decision-makers, scientists, and engineers with new tools to help forecast significant weather-marine events and support related management or emergency responses. SAM aims to fill the gap between the wind-driven wave models, which produce simulations and forecasts of waves of significant height, period, and direction in deep or mid-water, and the run-up local models, which exstimulate marine ingression in the event of intense weather phenomena. It employs a parallelization scheme that allows users to run it on heterogeneous parallel architectures. It produced results approximately 24 times faster than the baseline when using shared memory with distributed memory, processing roughly 20,000 coastal cross-shore profiles along the coastline of the Campania region (Italy). Increasing the performance of this model and, at the same time, honoring the need for relatively modest HPC resources will enable the local manager and policymakers to enforce fast and effective responses to intense weather phenomena.