Abstract

From Hurricanes to Coastal Flood Maps: A GIS Approach
Track: Disaster and Emergency Management
Authors: celso moller ferreira

Hurricanes are one of the most costly natural disasters to strike the US and a recurrent treat to coastal population and infrastructure. Based on Arc StormSurge, a framework to integrate hurricane storm surge modeling and GIS, here we present advances to the framework using a new GIS approach developed to generate coastal flood maps based on High Performance Computing (HPC) hurricane storm surge simulations (SWAN+ADCIRC). A new algorithm using ArcPY was developed to automate the delineation of flooded areas, efficiently combining information from Digital Elevation Models (DEM) and model results based on unstructured finite element meshes (e.g., water levels and wetting and drying schemes) to refine the delineation of the flooded areas. The algorithm is implemented in form of an ArcGIS toolbox, can be used for automation in model builder and further published as a web service. A case study will be presented for Hurricane Irene (2011).