Document Type
Article
Department/Program
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
Publication Date
3-19-2014
Journal
Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
Volume
2
Issue
1
First Page
226
Last Page
246
Abstract
Hurricane Sandy inflicted heavy damage in New York City and the New Jersey coast as the second costliest storm in history. A large-scale, unstructured grid storm tide model, Semi-implicit Eulerian Lagrangian Finite Element (SELFE), was used to hindcast water level variation during Hurricane Sandy in the mid-Atlantic portion of the U.S. East Coast. The model was forced by eight tidal constituents at the model’s open boundary, 1500 km away from the coast, and the wind and pressure fields from atmospheric model Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) provided by Weatherflow Inc. The comparisons of the modeled storm tide with the NOAA gauge stations from Montauk, NY, Long Island Sound, encompassing New York Harbor, Atlantic City, NJ, to Duck, NC, were in good agreement, with an overall root mean square error and relative error in the order of 15–20 cm and 5%–7%, respectively. Furthermore, using large-scale model outputs as the boundary conditions, a separate sub-grid model that incorporates LIDAR data for the major portion of the New York City was also set up to investigate the detailed inundation process. The model results compared favorably with USGS’ Hurricane Sandy Mapper database in terms of its timing, local inundation area, and the depth of the flooding water. The street-level inundation with water bypassing the city building was created and the maximum extent of horizontal inundation was calculated, which was within 30 m of the data-derived estimate by USGS.
DOI
Keywords
Hurricane Sandy; storm surge; inundation; sub-grid modeling
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Wang, Harry V.; Loftis, Jon Derek; Liu, Zhou; Forrest, David R.; and Zhang, Yinglong J., The Storm Surge and Sub-Grid Inundation Modeling in New York City during Hurricane Sandy (2014). Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 2(1), 226-246.
