The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and project partners together with FEMA are developing and applying a state-of-the-art storm surge risk assessment capability for the Great Lakes region. The goal is to develop and apply a complete end-to-end modeling system, with all required forcing inputs, for updating the floodplain levels for coastal and inland watershed communities. Key components of this study include:
- Develop a high-resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for the Great Lakes.
- Convert the DEM to an unstructured modeling grid, with a horizontal resolution up to 50-m, for use with the production system.
- Prepare an end-to-end modeling system for assessment of Great Lakes coastal storm surge hazards.
- Define the Great Lakes storm hazard in terms of historical storms and simulated storm related parameters.
- Verify model accuracy on a variety of reconstructed storm events.
- Conduct production storm simulations to estimate surge levels for defined set of synthetic storm events
- Perform statistical analyses to compute the 10-, 50-, 100-, and 500-year flood levels