{"id":177754,"date":"2022-06-27T15:02:55","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T19:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/?p=177754"},"modified":"2022-06-30T11:13:20","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T15:13:20","slug":"actionable-information-sp22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/gso\/publications\/aboard-gso\/actionable-information-sp22\/","title":{"rendered":"Actionable Information"},"content":{"rendered":"

Actionable Information<\/em><\/h1>

Isaac Ginis\u2019 team is making dramatic improvements in storm-damage prediction.<\/p><\/div><\/div>

<\/div>
Accessibility controls<\/div>
Pause motion<\/div>
Motion: On<\/span><\/div><\/div>
Play motion<\/div>
Motion: Off<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div>
Increase text contrast<\/div>
Contrast: Standard<\/span><\/div><\/div>
Reset text contrast<\/div>
Contrast: High<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/div>
Apply site-wide<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>\n
\n<\/div>\n

By Hugh Markey<\/h4>\n
\n

\"\"In 1954, one of the worst disasters in Rhode Island history swept through the state. Hurricane Carol brought wind speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Worse, it made landfall at high tide, creating a storm surge that flooded downtown Providence with 12 feet of water. When it finally passed, the storm had left 620 homes destroyed and 17 people to bury. By the 1960s, the city of Providence commissioned the construction of the Fox Point hurricane barrier, with an aim toward preventing the kind of overwhelming storm surge that turned downtown into Venice.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

The trouble was, there was no way to really test it. Only another massive storm, one that made landfall at high tide, would reveal whether the barrier could get the job done. And from 1954 to today, another storm like that has yet to occur. Which is not to say it won\u2019t. <\/p>\n

Enter Professor Isaac Ginis, from the University of Rhode Island\u2019s Graduate School of Oceanography. For the past six years, Ginis and a team of experts and graduate students, which include Mansur Ali Jisan, Deborah Crowley, Angelos Papandreou and Joshua Port, have been developing ways to calculate the impact of a major storm that makes landfall. Ginis has developed a computer program that, when fed the needed information, can act as a warning bell to stakeholders like the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency (RIEMA), the Department of Environmental Management (DEM), the R.I. Wastewater Facility, and the Fox Point hurricane barrier in real time. The result is the Rhode Island Coastal Hazards, Analysis, Modeling, and Prediction (RI-CHAMP) system with an official launch date of June, just at the start of hurricane season. <\/p>\n

\"\"

\u201cMy focus is mainly New England. There's been a lack of attention to hurricanes here, with the focus on more tropical places like the Gulf of Mexico.\u201d<\/blockquote><\/div><\/section><\/p>\n

\u201cThe project was funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security six or seven years ago, and the focus has been on improving the forecast of hurricanes when they make landfall,\u201d said Ginis. \u201cMy focus is mainly New England. There\u2019s been a lack of attention to hurricanes here, with the focus on more tropical places like the Gulf of Mexico. There\u2019s also a difference between landfall in the south and in the north. That difference is called the extra tropical transition, when a hurricane moves from the southern region to colder water, so their structure, size and wind changes. The farther the move to the north, the more complex the storm becomes.”<\/p>\n

The storm surge models in New England have lacked the necessary spatial resolution to be highly accurate, but the model Ginis came up with allows him to cover an area with a mesh or grid, which provides higher resolution and gathers more information about a storm surge. Adopted from a University of North Carolina model called ADCIRC, Ginis\u2019 model allowed spatial resolution to be downscaled from grid points five kilometers apart to one that has a resolution of ten meters. This higher resolution allows the user to be able to differentiate whether the land area being targeted is a forest, a lake, or a city for example. Identifying those landforms is essential to accurately forecast inland flooding. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that our rivers in New England are relatively short and shallow. That makes them prone to flooding, such as happened in Warwick during 2010\u2019s tropical storm Henri. Now we can look at severe flooding both in the rivers but also coastal flooding. We input information about land elevation and flew planes that collected LiDAR data with a resolution of one meter. We also get information about wind speeds from the National Weather Service, but it\u2019s on a large scale, on the scale of an entire storm. Here, we can downscale and refine the predictions from NWS to provide actionable information to decision makers.\u201d Ginis notes that the program will work with nor\u2019easters as well. <\/p>\n