Three movies of initial Hurricane Katrina storm surge model runs are shown below. These are still preliminary and refinements are ongoing. The movies show three zoom levels of the New Orleans area. To show the second two movies,right click and select 'play'.

The arrows indicate wind vectors, the colors indicate water levels with shades of blue showing a lowering of water surface elevation, and shades of red showing a rise.

Notes for Katrina ADCIRC Hindcast 2

Simulation done by Joannes Westerink, University of Notre Dame
In cooperation with Dave Mark (USACE), Jay Ratcliff (USACE), Jesse Feyen (NOS/NOAA) and Hassan Mashriqui (LSU).

Performed for/in cooperation with the Coastal Hydraulics Laboratory at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center and the Center for the Public Study of Health Impacts of Hurricanes at LSU.

The grid/topography/bathymetry that was used in the simulation was the S08 model run with the ADCIRC code. The S08 model was developed for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District. Specific information for Hindcast 2 is as follows.

• No tides were included
• Steric sea level rise of 0.37 meters was included
• Atmospheric wind and pressure fields were generated with a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers version of Vince Cardone’s PBL Hurricane Simulator using 1.5 hourly interpolated track and storm information from NWS/NOAA and posted by Unisys at http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/2005/KATRINA/track.dat

Note that there were several timing errors in the posting, especially near landfall, which were corrected. The resulting 1.5 hourly interpolated data were run through PBL to generate 15 minute wind/pressure fields that are linearly interpolated within ADCIRC. Dense snaps are necessary for fast moving storms in order to not alias energy of the storms between snaps.

• The simulation was started 8/25/03Z (t=0 in the simulation) and was run for 8 days.
• Highway 61 and the railroad entrance west of New Orleans were NOT sandbagged in this simulation.
• Simulated breaches were placed on the east side of the 17 th Street Canal and on the east side of the London Avenue Canal. These breaches opened the levees down to adjacent land elevation on 8/29/20Z.
• The levees were lowered to 3 m on the east side of the Industrial Canal between N. Claiborne Ave and Florida Ave. to simulate the breach there. Note that we did not lower any levees on the west side of the Industrial Canal.

The simulations show various zooms of surface elevation in meters and wind speed in m/sec between 8/29/00Z and 8/30/12Z (note that t=0 equals 8/25/03Z). Maximum surge height during the event was 8.74m.

For more information on the S08 model and Southern Louisiana simulations:
S08/Betsy page
Westerink et al.
Ppt presentation

We will be adding tides, adding sandbags to the west side of New Orleans and refining breach times in Hindcasts 3 and 4. We will be adding descriptions of the storm surge flow physics in addition to high water marks.

 

Additional information is shown below. Click on the images for larger views.

Figure 1. Computational domain with bathymetry (m).	Figure 2. Unstructured grid of the entire domain.
Figure 3. Detail of bathymetry and topography across Southern Louisiana (m).	Figure 4. Detail of the unstructured grid in Southern Louisiana.
Figure 5. Detail of bathymetry and topography across eastern Southern Louisiana (m).	Figure 6. Detail of the unstructured grid in eastern Southern Louisiana.