Coastal Land Loss and WaveSurge Prediction During Hurricanes in SouthCentral Louisiana: Implications

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Coastal Land Loss and Wave-Surge Prediction
During Hurricanes in South-Central Louisiana
Implications for the Oil and Gas Industry

• Louisiana State University
• United States Geological Survey
• Louisiana Department of Natural Resources
• Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory (USACE)

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Research Team

• Coastal Studies Institute
• Stone, Sheremet, Zhang and Braud
• National Wetlands Research Center (USGS)
• Barras, Steyer and Johnson
• Coastal and Hydraulics Research Center
• Dr. Norman Scheffner
• Leader in numerical surge prediction

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Objective

• Quantification of the impact of barrier and
  wetland loss on inshore and onshore locations
  where oil and gas and support industry
  infrastructure is located with respect to severe
  storm surge and wave conditions

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Hypothesis

• Potential wave-storm surge flooding impacts on
  infrastructure get more severe each hurricane
  season due to our enormous wetland and barrier
  island loss

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Tools

• State-of-the-Science Numerical Models
• Storm Surge ADCIRC
• (USACE)
• Storm Waves SWAN
• Coastal Studies Institute
• Bathymetric/Topographic Surfaces
• USGS and CSI

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Steps Completed

• Computational grid preparation for hindcast,
  nowcast and forecast scenarios
• Completion of metocean boundary conditions for
  modeling
• Running ADCIRC for surge
• Coupling surge to wave model for combined surge
  and wave output

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Date of landfall 1915 Max. wind speed 110
mph Min. central pressure 935 mb
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ADCIRC GRID
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Louisiana Computational Grid
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SWAN Simulating Waves Nearshore

• Third generation spectral wave model
• Action balance equation
• Shoaling, refraction, generation by wind,
  whitecapping, triad and quadruplet wave-wave
  interactions, bottom and depth induced breaking

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Increase in Storm Surge (1950-2020)
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Next Steps

• Prepare wave-surge multiple GIS layers
• Couple to Multi-layered GIS containing oil and
  gas infrastructure
• Develop interactive GIS of project data