Category Archives: Models
Seminar: University of Connecticut
Seminar: Virginia Tech
Presentation: CARTHE 2012
News: Forecasting of Hurricane Isaac
2012/08/29 – Computerworld
Supercomputers help New Orleans prepare for Hurricane Isaac
Computing advances since Katrina have helped the city plan better on the storm surge, for one
Supercomputers help New Orleans prepare for Hurricane Isaac
Computing advances since Katrina have helped the city plan better on the storm surge, for one
About the time of Katrina, the computer models “were much coarser and had minimum resolutions of only 100-200 meters,” said Casey Dietrich, a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at University of Texas in Austin.
Dietrich has been running compute models at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas to assess the impact of the storm surge on Texas.
Emergency planners in both states take the data generated by the university researchers and incorporate it into geographic information systems.
“They can look down at neighborhood scale and say ‘on this street along the levy we’re going to have water this high,’ and plan accordingly,” Dietrich said.
Comparing the capability today with that at the time of Katrina, Dietrich said: “I think we have a very strong understanding of how hurricane wave storm develop and how they can threaten a coastal environment.”
Also see local coverage by the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.
Performance of the Unstructured-Mesh, SWAN+ADCIRC Model in Computing Hurricane Waves and Surge
Coupling wave and circulation models is vital in order to define shelf, nearshore and inland hydrodynamics during a hurricane. The intricacies of the inland floodplain domain, level of required mesh resolution and physics make these complex computations very cycle-intensive. Nonetheless, fast wall-clock times are important, especially when forecasting an incoming hurricane.
We examine the performance of the unstructured-mesh, SWAN+ADCIRC wave and circulation model applied to a high-resolution, 5M-vertex, finite-element SL16 mesh of the Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana. This multi-process, multi-scale modeling system has been integrated by utilizing inter-model communication that is intra-core. The modeling system is validated through hindcasts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (2005), Gustav and Ike (2008) and comprehensive comparisons to wave and water level measurements throughout the region. The performance is tested on a variety of platforms, via the examination of output file requirements and management, and the establishment of wall-clock times and scalability using up to 9,216 cores. Hindcasts of waves and storm surge can be computed efficiently, by solving for as many as 2.3E12 unknowns per day of simulation, in as little as 10 minutes of wall-clock time.
Example Input Files for SWAN+ADCIRC
Updated 2023/02/24: Corrected the
Updated 2021/12/13: Adding example files for SWAN v41.31 with ST6 physics.
Updated 2016/09/18: Adding example files for use with older versions of SWAN.
Updated 2016/07/31: Minor changes to the SWAN control file to be compatible with SWAN v41.10.
fort.26 file for SWAN v41.31 to remove erroneous WCAP input.Updated 2021/12/13: Adding example files for SWAN v41.31 with ST6 physics.
Updated 2016/09/18: Adding example files for use with older versions of SWAN.
Updated 2016/07/31: Minor changes to the SWAN control file to be compatible with SWAN v41.10.
Many new users of SWAN+ADCIRC, after reading the instructions on how to compile and run the coupled models, have asked for example input files to test their implementation. This page provides an example application of Hurricane Gustav (2008), using files that were available already on the Internet for other applications.
The entire set of example input files is: Gustav-EC95d-v41.31.zip.
- For versions before SWAN 41.31 and ADCIRC 55.00, please use: Gustav-EC95d-v41.10.zip.
- For versions before SWAN 41.10 and ADCIRC 53.00, please use: Gustav-EC95d-Old.zip.
The individual files are also linked and described below. They have been modified to be compatible with the latest versions of the codes, and to reflect our latest settings for SWAN and ADCIRC. These files are extremely coarse, both in the mesh resolution and the wind field, but they are a good starting point for new users of the coupled models. For more information about our high-resolution hindcast of Gustav, please see our article in Monthly Weather Review.