For the Instructor
These student materials complement the Coastal Processes, Hazards and Society Instructor Materials. If you would like your students to have access to the student materials, we suggest you either point them at the Student Version which omits the framing pages with information designed for faculty (and this box). Or you can download these pages in several formats that you can include in your course website or local Learning Managment System. Learn more about using, modifying, and sharing InTeGrate teaching materials.Modeling Storm Surge
The next step is to plug your number into the storm surge model.
The three parameters to be entered in the model are:
- Water depth (the depth of the water at the deepest point before storm surge (10 m depth in our example)
- Wind velocity (m/s)
- Bed slope (as calculated above)
In order to understand the relationships between wind, bed slope and storm surge, we will first plot some numbers.
a. Slope vs. Surge Height at 10m Water Depth
h0 (m) | 10 |
---|---|
Slope | Surge (m) |
0.000854 | 2.0838 |
0.000427 | 3.4085 |
0.000214 | 5.4705 |
0.000107 | 8.613 |
b. Wind Speed vs. Surge Height at 10m Water Depth
slope | 0.00016 |
h0 (m) | 10 |
u10 (m/s) | Surge (m) |
2 | 0.0685 |
5 | 0.3109 |
10 | 0.9215 |
20 | 2.5631 |
40 | 6.6233 |
80 | 15.67 |
Investigating influence of wind speed and slope on storm surge:
Use Excel to plot the two sets of numbers above. Once you have done that, answer the following questions about the plot in your worksheet.
- Describe the relationships you see.
- Using the storm surge model, manipulate the height of the storm surge by entering each of the numbers in the data sets above in turn. Watch how the storm surge changes as you enter different values for wind speed and slope.
- In what way does the angle of the slope of the bed or shoreline influence the height of the storm surge?
- In what way does the wind speed affect the height of the storm surge?