Prediction of storm surge using tropical cyclone information based on a global atmosphere model and a tide-surge model

Abstract

The south-eastern coast of Korea (the Republic of Korea) has often been damaged by storm surge and high wavesdue to the typhoon, therefore it is important to predict typhoon movement and storm surge accurately and quickly.We made an attempt to 1-way couple the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS), a global atmosphere model,and the ADvanced CIRCulation model (ADCIRC), a tide-surge model, i.e. providing the atmosphere model’s outputsfor tide-surge model’s forcing. The MPAS has the unstructured Voronoi meshes and allows higher-resolutionfor the target area, thus the variable mesh system based on the mesh resolutions of 15 km in the region of interest,the western Pacific region and 60 km in the entire model domain was built and was run for prediction oftyphoon once a day during summer, July to September. The ADCIRC model also has a flexible unstructured mesh,thus the high-resolution with minimum mesh size of 50 m was formed in the south-eastern coast. The typhooninformation such as typhoon track, maximum wind, minimum air pressure and radius of storm can be extractedfrom the atmosphere model output using the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) vortex tracker, andthen the tide-surge model calculates the storm surge using Holland type vortex model and the typhoon informationproduced by the atmosphere model and vortex tracker. In this study, this coupled model system was used to prediempt to 1-way couple the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS), a global atmosphere model,and the ADvanced CIRCulation model (ADCIRC), a tide-surge model, i.e. providing the atmosphere model’s outputsfor tide-surge model’s forcing. The MPAS has the unstructured Voronoi meshes and allows higher-resolutionfor the target area, thus the variable mesh system based on the mesh resolutions of 15 km in the region of interest,the western Pacific region and 60 km in the entire model domain was built and was run for prediction oftyphoon once a day during summer, July to September. The ADCIRC model also has a flexible unstructured mesh,thus the high-resolution with minimum mesh size of 50 m was formed in the south-eastern coast. The typhooninformation such as typhoon track, maximum wind, minimum air pressure and radius of storm can be extractedfrom the atmosphere model output using the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) vortex tracker, andthen the tide-surge model calculates the storm surge using Holland type vortex model and the typhoon informationproduced by the atmosphere model and vortex tracker. In this study, this coupled model system was used to predi