At the Seattle All-hands meeting in November 2023, the Deltares Modelling Team presented their results on the 2023 Hurricane Season.
Roland Romeiser and Hans Graber of the University of Miami presented NHCI radargrammetry project results at the TerraSAR-X / TanDEM-X Science Team Meeting in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.
As part of the NHCI response to Hurricane Lee, researchers in collaboration with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Scientific Development Squadron (VXS-1) airdropped wave buoys from a P3 aircraft on Thursday, September 14th, 2023.
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Scientific Development Squadron (VXS) 1 mobilized a crew for a NP-3C Orion operation with less than 24 hours’ notice to airdrop 10 Sofar Spotter buoys in the Gulf of Mexico ahead of Hurricane Idalia on Monday, August 28.
On Monday, August 28th, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Scientific Development Squadron (VXS-1) airdropped 18 buoys associated with the Task 3A teams of the NOPP Hurricane Coastal Impacts project in the path of Hurricane Idalia.
At IGARSS 2023 in Pasadena, CA, the PIs of the two Task 2 remote sensing groups of the University of Miami and the University of Massachusetts presented results of their Hurricane Ian studies.
The Deltares team forecasts 2023 hurricane activity for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts, and looks back at predictions for Hurricane Ian.
In the Coastal Sediments 2023 meeting in New Orleans, Ellen Quataert of the Deltares team shared modelling and observational results of the effect of dune and backbay vegetation on barrier island breaching processes in Florida and North Carolina.
The Deltares team on modelling hurricane impacts presented their results on the impacts of Hurricane Ian at the Coastal Sediments Conference, held 12-14 April in New Orleans, LA.
From November 29 to December 1st, all ten NHCI teams gathered at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for the 2022 all-hands meeting.
The National Oceanographic Partnership Program’s (NOPP) Predicting Hurricane Coastal Impacts Project (NHCI) was mentioned in a White House press release.
Following the rapid-response air deployment of an array of buoys in the Gulf of Mexico ahead of Hurricane Ian, team members closely monitored the data collected by the devices.
by Martha Schönau, Luca Centurioni, Steve Jayne, and Elizabeth Sanabia
Task 3B met our project objectives to rapidly deploy water level and wave sensors in cross-shore transects, spanning offshore to inland, to collect data for model validation, following a short but effective timeline.
Jon Moskaitis, Will Komaromi, and James Doyle (NRL-Monterey)
Hurricane Ian was the first 2022 hurricane to make landfall in the continental USA with strong Cat 5 winds and large amounts of rain. The team of Deltares USA, Deltares Netherlands, USGS and NRL successfully applied the COSMOS modelling system to forecast hurricane Ian’s flood and morphological impact.
On Monday, September 26th, 2022, 20 buoys were successfully deployed in the Gulf of Mexico ahead of Hurricane Ian as part of the NOPP Hurricane Coastal Impacts project. The deployment, which was facilitated by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, created a real-time sensor network to monitor Ian’s location and intensity as it advanced towards Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Example result featuring COSMO-SkyMed SAR images obtained by the University of Miami's remote sensing team in the hours after the landfall of Hurricane Ian.
The Task 2 team has obtained SAR images of the region on Florida's west coast affected by the landfall of Hurricane Ian. This update shows a COSMO-SkyMed SAR image of the Sanibel Causeway, specifically, which was heavily damaged by the storm.
Steve Frasier of the remote sensing group at the University of Massachusetts presented some new stereo radargrammetry results based on the Capella SAR images of the Hurricane Michael test area.
The University of Miami group prepared a status report on new achievements in the improvement of radargrammetry products.
July 18-22, 2022, College Park, MD
Sofar has started deploying Smart Moorings (Spotter buoys sensing surface waves, temperature, and barometric pressure along with water level from subsurface pressure sensors) in key locations in the Gulf and Atlantic coast to provide critical offshore observations (~20m depth) in tandem with cross-shore transects of USGS land-based water level observations to improve forecasts of hurricane impacts.
In the framework of the NOPP project “Hurricane Coastal Impacts” Deltares USA, Deltares Netherlands, USGS, NRL-SSC and IHE Delft are developing a forecasting system that can compute hurricane impacts of flooding, erosion and structural damage along the US Gulf of Mexico coast and the Eastern Seaboard.
On July 5th, the Deltares modelling team was trained in the use of the COSMOS modelling system and visualization tool. The modelling system consists of large-scale surge (using SFINCS) and wave (using HurryWave) models for the Northern Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico which will be forced with COAMPS and/or GFS meteo. These large-scale models in turn drive SFINCS overland flood models and XBeach morphodynamic models. At the moment, 11 SFINCS models are implemented along the entire Gulf of Mexico coast and the South East Atlantic Coast. 100s of XBeach models are implemented along the sandy coastlines of the Gulf as well. In the training Roel de Goede instructed the other members on the workflow of running a hurricane event. Pictured are (from left to right: Ap van Dongeren, Roel de Goede, Panos Athanasiou, Maarten van Ormondt and Ellen Quataert. (Not pictured: Floor Roelvink and Kees Nederhoff). A screenshot of the NOPP event viewer shows the current (non-hurricane) wave conditions in the Northern Atlantic as computed using our new and fast HurryWave model.
While the European Space Agency (ESA) provides SAR-derived wind fields over the ocean together with Sentinel-1 SAR imagery, users have to apply their own algorithms to retrieve wind products from SAR images from other satellites.
In preparation for land-based sensor deployments during the 2022 Hurricane season, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) conducted field tests at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Field Research Facility (FRF) in Duck, North Carolina in late March 2022.
The University of Miami group received first radargrammetry results from industry partner Airbus Defence and Space in December. These land topography products are based on a set of SAR images of the area on the Florida panhandle where Hurricane Michael made landfall in 2018. The test images were acquired between August 26 and September 1, 2021, as reported earlier.
UW APL has been testing microSWIFT buoy deployments from NOAA aircraft.
Coastal Elevation Models and Land Surface Variables for Use in Forecasting Hurricane Impacts
In today's PI meeting, both remote sensing groups reported on first findings regarding the radargrammetric processing of pairs of test images acquired in the landfall area of Hurricane Michael (2018).
In today's PI meeting, the UMass group presented example images of regions affected by the recent landfall of Hurricane Ida near New Orleans.
The two SAR remote sensing groups at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) and the University of Miami (UMiami) reported in today’s PI meeeting that their industry partners, Capella Space and Airbus Defence and Space, have acquired several SAR images that will be used for algorithm development and testing.
The European satellites Sentinel-1A and -1B acquire synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of coastal regions of the U.S. on a regular basis, and they can be programmed to acquire additional images at times of hurricanes and similar events of interest. The European Space Agency makes all Sentinel-1 imagery available to interested users in near real time, free of charge. Together with the radar intensity images, derived wind fields are provided.