Title of talk:  Computational Challenges to Prediction and Mitigation of Coastal Hazards

Abstract:

Coastal flooding due to severe storms is one of the most widespread and damaging hazards faced around the world.  The threat of these events has grown not only due to increased population and economic reliance on coastal regions but also due to climate change impacts such as sea-level rise.

Computational predictive capabilities are critical to addressing this threat but require the ability to handle multiple, disparate scales, handle the physics relevant at each of these scales, and remain tractable under the necessity of large ensembles to handle uncertainty in the input.  In this talk a number of efforts to addressing these and other issues related to storm surge computational models will be discussed.  These include the use of adaptive mesh refinement, extensions to the modeling equations (such as the multi-layer shallow water equations), strategies for tackling multi-scale aspects of the problem, and work towards increasing computational efficiency.