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Addition of Wave Runup/Overtopping to the Puerto Rico Storm Surge Atlas Aurelio Mercado-Irizarry Department of Marine Sciences, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, PR 00680
BACKGROUND AND PROJECT RELEVANCE Recently the Puerto Rico Storm Surge Atlas was finalized under a study titled Storm Surge Modeling in Puerto Rico in Support of Emergency Response, Risk Assessment, Coastal Planning and Climate Change Analysis, sponsored by the Caribbean Coastal Ocean Observing System (CariCOOS; http://www.caricoos.org/) and the Puerto Rico Coastal Zone Management Program (PRCZMP) of the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources of Puerto Rico. Both programs themselves are funded by NOAA. The following is a very brief summary of what has been done, and for a more detailed explanation please go to the accompanying Technical Report, whose link to download can be found at http://coastalhazardspe.wordpress.com. The Atlas was prepared by running the coupled ADCIRC+SWAN models. ADCIRC is an advanced circulation model widely used for storm surge modeling, which has been coupled with another widely used spectral wind wave model, SWAN, so that between the two models the three storm surge factors, pressure + wind + wave setups, are calculated. Hurricanes with headings along four different trajectories (60°, 270°, 290°, and 330°, all relative to True North) were used to populate the Atlas. It should be stated that the hurricane heading of 60° (SW to NE) was included, but being such a rare event – it has never happened in Puerto Rico’s hurricane history – its results were not added to the results from the other headings in order to compute the so-called Maximum of the Maximums (MOMs – to be explained below) and SuperMOMs (MOM of the MOMs). This track was run in order to have an idea of what to expect, especially along the west coast of the island, in case it becomes a reality sometime. The Climate Change part of the work done comes from the fact that three sea level scenarios were contemplated: present (circa 2002), +0.5 and +1.0 meters of sea level rise above present (2002; this should be emphasized since sea level has been raising around Puerto Rico at a rate − 1 cm/year since approximately 2010 – see http://coastalhazardspr.wordpress.com). Many studies have discussed, and documented, how sea level rise increases the risk of coastal flooding due to storm surges (Kleinosky et al. 2007; Smith et al. 2010; Lin et al. 2012; Woodruff et al. 2013; Bilskie et al. 2016). A total of 82x3x5 = 1,230 runs were made, where the 5 comes from the 5 Saffir-Simpson categories, the 3 from the three sea level scenarios, and the 82 from the total number of hurricane tracks used per hurricane category. The way it goes is that each individual hurricane track outputs a Maximum Envelope of Waters (MEOW). The collection of all the individual MEOWs