Front (left to right): Sarah Grace Lott, Nicole Arrigo, Nahruma Pieu, Seun Omogbehin, Caroline Collins. Middle (left to right): Katherine Couch, Molly McKenna, Casey Dietrich, Kira Nuviae. Back (left to right) Liam Ryan, Jenero Knowles, Maren Goodman.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Baroclinic 3D modeling of circulation patterns in the Pamlico-Albemarle Sound System
