![](https://ccht.ccee.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Dietrich-Team.jpg)
Front (left to right): Carter Howe, Autumn Poisson, Alireza Gharagozlou, and Johnathan Woodruff. Back (left to right): Tucker Fulle, Ajimon Thomas, Casey Dietrich, and Carter Rucker. Not shown: Chloe Stokes.
Front (left to right): Carter Howe, Autumn Poisson, Alireza Gharagozlou, and Johnathan Woodruff. Back (left to right): Tucker Fulle, Ajimon Thomas, Casey Dietrich, and Carter Rucker. Not shown: Chloe Stokes.
We should share more pretty images from our research, including this image of coastal floodplains and river channels. This is part of a larger mesh from Ajimon Thomas’s PhD work.
Ph.D. student Alireza Gharagozlou won the Student Educational Award at the ASBPA National Coastal Conference 2018. This award is given annually to an undergraduate or graduate student who, through his or her research, is furthering the state of the science of coastal systems as it relates to the goals and mission of the ASBPA. Congrats to Alireza!
Alireza accepts the Student Educational Award during the awards luncheon at the ASBPA National Coastal Conference.
Members of the NCSU coastal engineering team celebrating the successful PhD defense by Rosemary Cyriac.
Much of the North Carolina coast is lined with sandy beaches and dunes, which can erode during storms, allowing sand onto major roadways and floodwaters into communities. To develop predictions for this erosion and its effects on infrastructure, it was critical to collect observations shortly after the storm. A multi-disciplinary team led by Dr. Elizabeth Sciaudone traveled to Dare County to collect time-sensitive data at Kitty Hawk, Nags Head, Pea Island, and Hatteras Island. Working in conjunction with the Institute for Transportation Research and Education (ITRE), the Center for Geospatial Analytics in the College of Natural Resources, and industry partner SenseFly, researchers surveyed beach and dune changes. Real-Time Kinematic GPS equipment was used to survey select cross-shore beach and dune profiles and document the extent of dune erosion and overwash (inland sand deposits), such as when NC Highway 12 becomes covered after large storms.
Hurricane Florence, which is now a Category 2 storm, continues to bear down on the Carolina coast. The National Weather Service says it is likely to be “the storm of a lifetime” for certain portions of that coastline. Officials have ordered the evacuation of over 1 million people from the coasts of North and South Carolina. … Stasio is joined by Casey Dietrich, a professor in North Carolina State University’s Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering and leader of its Coastal and Computational Hydraulics Team. Dietrich explains the models currently being refined to help predict and plan for hurricanes and their effects on coastlines.
For this episode of The State of Things, the full-length podcast is embedded below. The interview with Casey Dietrich starts at about the 37-minute mark. It was great to describe our projects with DHS, NSF, and NC Sea Grant as part of this episode about Hurricane Florence.
Although Ayse was never an official member of the CCHT, she did contribute to our Risk Analytics Discovery Environment (RADE) project. Her presentation was related to that project, in which she developed containers for her models for coastal erosion and decision-making in coastal households. We are very proud of her good work.
Planning for a hurricane is a complicated process involving many stakeholders and varying degrees of uncertainty. Accurate predictions of storm surge and wave heights are vital to decision-making before, during and after the storm. Creating these predictions through modeling software can be expensive and time-consuming. When dealing with hurricanes, time is critical for emergency managers and other officials.
Helping decision-makers to save valuable prediction time is CRC Principal Investigator Dr. Casey Dietrich of North Carolina State University (NCSU). His project, “Improving the Efficiency of Wave and Surge Models via Adaptive Mesh Resolution,” involves collaboration with co-PI Dr. Clint Dawson at the University of Texas at Austin. Their project focuses on speeding up a widely used prediction tool, ADCIRC. His work with North Carolina Emergency Management during Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and his contributions to developing future disaster resilience specialists, have helped make significant contributions to disaster preparation and recovery.