Coupled Ocean-Hydraulic Modeling for Socially Informed Compound Infrastructure Analysis in Clear Lake, TX
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With intensifying tropical cyclones and growing exposure along the coast, understanding and responding to coastal flood hazards is more important than ever. One response to this growing risk is the design and construction of massive resilient infrastructure projects such as the Galveston Bay Park Plan. Extensive modeling is necessary to predict the effects of such projects before investing the time and resources in their construction. However, the massive scale of hurricane systems makes resolving human-scale impacts difficult. To overcome this disparity of scale, many researchers have begun coupling large-scale oceanic hurricane models with high-resolution inland flooding models. This project presents an efficient one-way model coupling strategy incorporating storm surge data from ADCIRC into a 2D HEC-RAS model. This coupling strategy is applied to Houston’s Clear Creek watershed where it meets Galveston Bay to assess GBPP’s flood depth and extent reduction benefits in severe storm conditions. The finely detailed results of this model are then compared to Social Vulnerability Index data to assess the socioeconomic distribution of flood reduction.
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Weathington, Briggs Tomás. "Coupled Ocean-Hydraulic Modeling for Socially Informed Compound Infrastructure Analysis in Clear Lake, TX." (2023) Master’s Thesis, Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/115149.