Updated 2020/06/24: Added documentation for --growradius none option.
Updated 2020/04/15: Added documentation for DEM vertical unit conversions.
The ADCIRC modeling system is used often to predict coastal flooding due to tropical cyclones and other storms. The model uses high resolution to represent the coastal environment, including flow pathways (inlets, man-made channels, rivers) and hydraulic controls (barrier islands, raised features). However, due to the use of large domains to represent hazards on coastlines in an entire state or multiple states, the highest resolution is typically about 20 to 50 m in coastal regions. Thus, there is a potential gap between the flooding predictions and the true flooding extents. We have developed a geospatial software to downscale the flooding extents to higher resolution.
ADCIRC vs. downscaled water levels, plan view. This image shows the difference in prediction of flooding extents, with the blue portion representing the original ADCIRC flooding extents and red representing the downscaled extents.
The following documentation is for downscaling the flooding predictions by using Kalpana. This software was created originally to view ADCIRC outputs as either ESRI shapefiles or KML files (for viewing in Google Earth). ADCIRC (the ADvanced CIRCulation model) uses finite element methods to predict water levels throughout the modeled domain. Although this model is able to provide accurate predictions in a matter of minutes, these predictions have a limited resolution and are not able to provide information at the scale of buildings, roadways, and other critical infrastructure.
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During coastal storms, forecasters and researchers use numerical models to predict the magnitude and extent of coastal flooding. These models must represent the large regions that may be affected by a storm, and thus, they can be computationally costly and may not use the highest geospatial resolution. However, predicted flood extents can be downscaled (by increasing resolution) as a post-processing step. Existing downscaling methods use either a static extrapolation of the flooding as a flat surface, or rely on subsequent simulations with nested, full-physics models at higher resolution. This research explores a middle way, in which the downscaling includes simplified physics to improve accuracy. Using results from a state-of-the-art model, we downscale its flood predictions with three methods: (1) static, in which the water surface elevations are extrapolated horizontally until they intersect the ground surface; (2) slopes, in which the gradient of the water surface is used; and (3) head loss, which accounts for energy losses due to land cover characteristics. The downscaling methods are then evaluated for forecasts and hindcasts of Hurricane Florence (2018), which caused widespread flooding in North Carolina. The static and slopes methods tend to over-estimate the flood extents. However, the head loss method generates a downscaled flooding extent that is a close match to the predictions from a higher-resolution, full-physics model. These results are encouraging for the use of these downscaling methods to support decision-making during coastal storms.
