A surge response function approach to coastal hazard assessment – part 1: basic concepts

Abstract

This paper reviews historical methods for estimating surge hazards and concludes that the class of solutions produced with Joint Probability Method (JPM) solutions provides a much more stable estimate of hazard levels than alternative methods. We proceed to describe changes in our understanding of the winds in hurricanes approaching a coast and the physics of surge generation that have required recent modifications to procedures utilized in earlier JPM studies. Of critical importance to the accuracy of hazard estimates is the ability to maintain a high level of fidelity in the numerical simulations while allowing for a sufficient number of simulations to populate the joint probability matrices for the surges. To accomplish this, it is important to maximize the information content in the sample storm set to be simulated. This paper introduces the fundamentals of a method based on the functional specification of the surge response for this purpose, along with an example of its application in the New Orleans area. A companion paper in this special issue (Irish et al. 2009) provides details of the portion of this new method related to interpolating/extrapolating along spatial dimensions.