Hurricane Katrina Storm Surge Hindcast Using a Coupled Storm Surge, Wind Wave and Tidal Current Model on an Unstructured Grid

Abstract

Hurricane Katina (2005) brought enormous damage to coastal protection systems in southern portions of the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, USA. In efforts to recover the devastated areas, construction of new systems to protect the areas from possible storm surge in the future has been a very urgent task. In this work, we develop a coupled storm surge, wind wave, riverine flow and tidal current model being used to design the new protection systems. The computational model employs the finite element method for the riverine, tide and storm surge model and takes advantage of unstructured grids to obtain precise estimation of possible surge heights from 100-year level storms. Observed hydrographs and high water marks during the hurricane are used to validate the developed model. The validation shows that the model is capable of reproducing the storm surge induced by the hurricane with good accuracy. The model is also found to be useful to understand how the hurricane caused the unprecedented surge levels.