Print Email Facebook Twitter The Extended North Sea Storm Atlas Title The Extended North Sea Storm Atlas: Improving and extending a new statistical approach for rapid flood forecasting in coastal areas Author Heineke, D.C. Contributor Reniers, A.J.H.M. (mentor) Faculty Civil Engineering and Geosciences Department Hydraulic Engineering Date 2016-11-17 Abstract In this thesis, the improvement and extension of the North Sea Storm Atlas is studied. The North Sea Storm Atlas is a new statistical approach for rapid flood forecasting in coastal areas. The method is based on a large database of potential weather scenarios. A detailed hydrodynamic numerical model (WAQUA-in-Simona/DCSM98) has been used to compute the storm surges of all the scenarios. In order to give a quick surge prediction for an upcoming storm event, a smart algorithm is used to compare the weather forecast to the database of weather scenarios. When the best matching scenario is found, the corresponding surge is retrieved as a forecast. In the current North Sea Storm Atlas, the weather patterns are characterized and matched based on the mean sea level pressure. In this research, the setup of an Extended North Sea Storm Atlas is proposed. The goal of the adjustments is to improve the accuracy of the surge predictions and to add predictions of significant wave heights. In order to do so, wind data is introduced in the characterization of the weather scenarios. Hereafter a new database of significant wave heights is built using the ECMWF daily forecast dataset and corresponding Wave Model (WAM) results. The validity of the Extended North Sea Storm Atlas is examined by hindcasting 33 historic storms. The outcomes are compared to hydrodynamic numerical model results at several locations along the North Sea coast. The root mean squared error is used as statistical measure to quantify the error in the 33 peaks of the surge and significant wave height hindcasts. It is concluded that the North Sea Storm Atlas can be used to construct reasonable predictions of the offshore significant wave height, with large time savings compared to real-time modeling. Besides it is found that solely wind as storm characterization does not lead to a structural improvement of the surge or wave predictions. Therefore it is suggested to use a combination of the mean sea level pressure and local wind speed in order to increase the accuracy. In this way the North Sea Storm Atlas will be able to account for both the complete storm system as well as local conditions. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0553c900-148a-4592-bb37-2275b6b02860 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights (c) 2016 Heineke, D.C. Files PDF mscThesis_DH_final.pdf 39.2 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:0553c900-148a-4592-bb37-2275b6b02860/datastream/OBJ/view