Assessment of hydrodynamic competence in extreme marine events through application of Boussinesq–Green–Naghdi models

Abstract

Here in present work, rotational Boussinesq–Green–Naghdi models were applied to assess the hydrodynamic intensity through the study of the boulder transport in east coast of Philippines during typhoon Haiyan and damage to coastal residences in New Jersey coast due to hurricane Sandy. The hydrodynamic forces were quantitatively analyzed and correlated to both boulder transport distance and the structural damage state in the two cases. The boulder transport was found initiated at vicinity of infragravity swash bores. Inertial force generated by the acceleration in front of the bore was found increasingly large as boulder sizes increased therefore far from negligible as in some other literatures. Besides, transport distances were highly sensitive to wave-heights and boulder sizes, so that onshore positions might be a viable approach of identifying rough magnitudes of paleostorm before other information is available. Fragility functions to predict the damage state of coastal residences due to runups was derived and preliminary validated. Water velocity and the shielding parameter were identified as major predictors of damage while free board and water depth are relatively insignificant. Due to the relative lack of wind damage observed, nearshore hydrodynamics featuring instantaneous nonhydrostatic impact might be the persistent cause of massive littoral processes and low-level structural failure in coastal regions during extreme marine events. Nonhydrostatic phase-resolving models such as Boussinesq-type models would be necessary complements for the intermediate-scale assessment of marine hazards in coastal ocean.