Tag Archives: Casey Dietrich
Casey wins CCEE Senior Mentor Award
Casey won the Excellence in Mentoring Award (Senior Faculty) from the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering (CCEE) at NC State University. This is nice recognition, especially because the nominations are submitted by the students. He appreciated the kind words in their nomination letters. We have a great team!
Casey accepts the award from Jackie MacDonald Gibson, while joined by his students Katherine Couch, Sarah Grace Lott, Jenero Knowles, Nicole Arrigo, Nahruma Pieu, and Kira Nuviae.
Conference: WRRI 2026
Posters: EWC Symposium 2026
Spatial and temporal controls within a coupled spectral wave and circulation model.
Community-Informed modeling of storm surge adaptations on barrier islands.
Baroclinic 3D modeling of circulation patterns in the Pamlico-Albemarle Sound System
Identifying the Extreme Scenario of Storm Tides from Tropical Cyclones in Coastal Communities.
News: Key Bridge
2026/02/18 – NCSU Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
The Baltimore Bridge Collapse: Understanding Water Currents and a Disaster’s Aftermath
The Baltimore Bridge Collapse: Understanding Water Currents and a Disaster’s Aftermath
While the simulators don’t explain the whole event, like why the Dali lost power in the first place, the models do explain how the local currents contributed to the ship’s drift toward the bridge. “The currents were stronger on the ship’s port side, and they caused it to turn southward and allide with the bridge pier,” Dietrich said.
The research team investigated a number of factors that could have influenced the Dali allision, such as channel depth, current speed and sea level rise. The researchers discovered that the ship’s drift motion was highly sensitive to uncertainties related to both the ship itself and its environment. In fact, they found that if the Dali had lost power just one minute later, the ship would have been much more likely to drift under the bridge unscathed.
Influence of Local Hydrodynamics on Ship Drift Leading to Ship-Bridge Allisions
An increase in commercial shipping has led to an increase in hazards for ship strikes on bridges, to which we refer as allisions. There is a need for a better understanding of how ships are affected by local flows as they approach an allision. We couple region- and local-scale models to simulate the allision of the container ship Dali with the Key Bridge. Simulations are forced with real tides, river inflows, and atmospheric conditions, and then the ship’s motion is predicted as it drifted and then allided with the bridge’s south pier. The trajectory is a close match to observations, and the allision timing is matched within 70 seconds of the real event. The ship’s southward turn was driven by a cross-channel gradient of 0.22 cm/s in the currents. Perturbations show the trajectory sensitivity to ship and environmental conditions, with many scenarios showing ship motion away from the bridge pier, as much as 500-m down-channel or 200-m to the north side. Simulations with wreckage show the depth-averaged currents may have increased by 10 to 20 cm/s in the temporary alternate channels around the bridge. Our findings can inform models for ship motion and management of navigation channels.
Poster: CERF 2025
SS Omogbehin, JC Dietrich. “Baroclinic 3D modeling of circulation patterns in the Pamlico–Albemarle Sound System.” Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) Biennial Conference, Richmond, Virginia, 10 November 2025.
Baroclinic 3D modeling of circulation patterns in the Pamlico-Albemarle Sound System
Ranges of Peak Storm Tides Between Open‐Coast and Bay Locations
Storm tides — the combination of tides and storm surge — cause flooding in coastal regions, often with differences in magnitudes between the open coast and locations within water bodies like bays and estuaries. Previous studies have shown that storm surge is sensitive to the storm’s wind intensity, speed, and track; the coast’s geometry and relative position to the storm; and also to nonlinear interactions with tides. These sensitivities have been documented at either open coast or bay locations, but without comparing or quantifying the differences in behavior between them, even though these differences may have implications for risk management. This study examines the range of peak storm tides within the Lower Chesapeake Bay, which has vulnerable communities at the open coast, like Virginia Beach, and inside the bay near the James River, like Hampton and Norfolk. A high‐resolution model was developed for the region and validated against observations of water levels during Hurricane Irene in 2011. Storm parameters were perturbed to analyze the variation in storm tide ranges. It was found that the range of possible storm tides was greater at bay locations than at the open coast, by as much as 47%. This higher variability at the bay locations was due to sensitivities to storm parameters like the wind intensity and storm tracks, which led to storm tide peaks outside of the interquartile range. This finding highlights the importance of understanding the uncertainty in storm forecasts concerning future possible impacts in complex coastal regions.