Presenter: Kelin Hu (Tulane University)

Description:
The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) is responsible for managing water resources in the interconnected Kissimmee River-Okeechobee Lake-Everglades stormwater treatment areas (wetland)-coastal system in South Florida, one of the most diverse and complex ecosystems in the world. To fulfill the need for long-term flood protection for basins throughout the 16-county region, a flood protection level of service (FPLOS) program has been established. The FPLOS not only requires the intensive assessment of the level of flood protection that is facilitated by inland hydraulics and hydrology but also needs past, current, and future sea levels downstream of the coastal basins for a different storm frequency. The objective of this study is to develop a storm surge modeling system for the Biscayne Bay by making use of several well-known coastal modeling tools including ADCIRC, SWAN, and D-Flow (the flexible mesh version of Delft3D). It includes an external, large-scale model (ADCIRC+SWAN) to provide off-shore boundary conditions and an internal, local model (D-Flow+SWAN) that computes small-scale flow and wave details within Biscayne Bay and the local canal system. The coastal water control structures were represented as gate structures in D-Flow. The coupled modeling system has been calibrated and validated by several historical hurricane events, such as Andrew (1992), Wilma (2005), and Irma (2017). Detailed results will be presented at the conference. This system can run parallelly and efficiently using High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources, which makes synthetic storm ensemble simulations possible. In addition, we will focus on hydraulic structure operation optimization and water quality modeling by the Real-Time Control (RTC) feature and the water quality module in D-Flow, respectively, in the near future.