Global Storm Tide Modeling with ADCIRC v55: Unstructured Mesh Design and Performance

Abstract. This paper details and tests numerical improvements to ADCIRC, a widely used finite element method shallow water equation solver, to more accurately and efficiently model global storm tides with seamless local mesh refinement in storm landfall locations. The sensitivity to global unstructured mesh design was investigated using automatically generated triangular meshes with a global minimum element size (MinEle) that ranged from 1.5 km to 6 km. We demonstrate that refining resolution based on topographic seabed gradients and employing a MinEle less than 3 km is important for the global accuracy of the simulated astronomical tide. Our recommended global mesh design (MinEle = 1.5 km) based on these results was locally refined down to two separate MinEle (500 m and 150 m) at the coastal landfall locations of two intense storms (Hurricane Katrina and Super Typhon Haiyan) to demonstrate the model's capability for coastal storm tide simulations and to test the sensitivity to local mesh refinement. Simulated maximum storm tide elevations closely follow the lower envelope of observed high water marks (HWMs) measured near the coast. In general, peak storm tide elevations along the open coast are decreased and the timing of the peak occurs later with local coastal mesh refinement. However, this mesh refinement only has a significant positive impact on HWM errors in straits and inlets narrower than the MinEle, and in bays and lakes separated from the ocean by these passages. Lastly, we demonstrate that the computational performance of the new numerical treatment is one-to-two orders of magnitude faster than studies using previous ADCIRC versions because gravity-wave based stability constraints are removed allowing for larger computational time steps.