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Wind Surge Study

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:

  1. Develop a high-resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for the Great Lakes.
  2. Convert the DEM to an unstructured modeling grid, with a horizontal resolution up to 50-m, for use with the production system.
  3. Prepare an end-to-end modeling system for assessment of Great Lakes coastal storm surge hazards.
  4. Define the Great Lakes storm hazard in terms of historical storms and simulated storm related parameters.
  5. Verify model accuracy on a variety of reconstructed storm events.
  6. Conduct production storm simulations to estimate surge levels for defined set of synthetic storm events
  7. Perform statistical analyses to compute the 10-, 50-, 100-, and 500-year flood levels