Jessica Gorski

Updated 2021/07/29

M.S. Student (Graduate Research Assistant)
Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering
North Carolina State University
Fitts-Woolard Hall, Room 3121
915 Partners Way
Raleigh NC 27607
jfgorski@ncsu.edu

I am a recent graduate of North Carolina State University, and I am excited to continue my education with the CCEE Department. As an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to participate in multiple research projects with the coastal engineering team. My first research experience was funded by the College of Engineering’s Women and Minority Summer Research Program. After completing the 10-week research project, I started an undergraduate research assistant position and was introduced to the morphological model eXtreme Beach (XBeach). Since then, the majority of my research experience has been focused on nearshore morphodynamics and erosional modeling. Previously, I assisted a project funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers looking at the morphological response of a beach nourishment project located in Nags Head, North Carolina. As a research assistant, I helped in the development and training of a morphological emulator. Future work for this project includes incorporating climate change projections and investigating how these projections may impact the shoreline response.

I am working on a Department of Defense project, Forecasting Coastal Impacts from Tropical Cyclones along the US East and Gulf Coasts using the ADCIRC Prediction System, where I will be focusing on the sediment transport portion of the coastal impact forecasting. I am looking forward to using XBeach as a tool for erosional forecasting and collaborating with a larger team of researchers across the country.

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Forecasting Coastal Impacts from Tropical Cyclones along the US East and Gulf Coasts using the ADCIRC Prediction System

To enhance the forecasting of wave, surge sediment transport (erosion and accretion above and below mean sea level), structure interaction and damage, we propose to heavily leverage our existing forecasting capability and experience operating the ADCIRC Prediction System (APS). We will enhance the current APS for surge, wave and inundation calculations, interface APS with the XBeach model to better represent nearshore and cross-shore wave processes and accompanying inundation and to predict sediment transport associated with the storm events. Wave and water level information from both APS and from XBeach will then be used to predict structure interaction and damage. Our efforts will focus on implementation and evaluation of our modeling system for hindcast events and/or for reanalysis of forecast events. Then we will utilize meteorological forcing to produce a daily forecast of coastal impacts beginning five days prior to landfall for at least three named hurricanes per year. These runs will be deterministic, commensurate with our approach to forecasting surge, wave and inundation from tropical cyclones in the APS. Given this experience, we are confident we will meet the forecast objectives of the NOPP community approach to model evaluation and improvement.

RA Luettich, MV Bilskie, BO Blanton, Z Cobell, DT Cox, JC Dietrich, JG Fleming, I Ginis. “Forecasting Coastal Impacts from Tropical Cyclones along the US East and Gulf Coasts using the ADCIRC Prediction System.” Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research, National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP), Predicting Hurricane Coastal Impacts FY21-24, 2021/04/06 to 2025/04/05, $1,400,000 (Dietrich: $295,000).