Case Study - Example
This section is intended to show the user how the storm surge calculator produces outputs. It shows the different steps along with the needed equations. This case study is comparing the three locations under the same storm conditions. It is recommended that the user reads the assumptions before proceeding.
What is storm surge?
Storm surge is the temporary rise in water level during storm events. This rise in water is caused by wind and pressure building up water in the direction of storm travel. Factors affecting the amount of storm surge are bathymetry, fetch length of the storm path, wind speed, pressure, and duration of the storm and typical has an increase on the scale of meters.
For this example, we looked at Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Chicago for a storm direction of NE (Green Bay and Chicago) and N (Milwaukee), a duration of 60 minutes, land wind speeds of 15 m/s and found harbor structure located at each coast.
The interface of the inputs, outputs and graphical aids are shown below for the case chosen. This calculator shows the difference in the storm surge varying by the location along the lake the storm hits. It is a great way to visualize the many factors affecting the storm surge and power caused by a storm.
Milwaukee
Green Bay
Chicago
Moving this project forward
To improve both the accuracy and use ability of this storm calculator, we would like to implement more features into the calculator.
- Calibrating this calculator with real storm events would improve the accuracy of the calculations.
- This calculator only considers wind induced storm surge, storm pressure would needs to be added for the full effect on storm surge
- More storm directions would allow this to be used for other non-extreme events. We had a difficult time implementing this because most fetches are N, NE, E or SE on the western Lake Michigan. We are not sure how lake dynamics are affected by landward storms. Here are some wind roses to show the usefulness other directions would allow this calculator to reach.
- Seiches cam also arise from storm events and comparing differences in seiches from the different locations along the lake shore would be a fun next project.
