Real Time Validation System for ADCIRC with Mississippi River Flooding as a Case Study

The ADCIRC finite element coastal ocean model serves as a workhorse for coastal and riverine hydrodynamics, tropical cyclone winds, and ocean wave modelling for public sector agencies including NOAA, FEMA, Coast Guard, and the US Army Corps of Engineers, among others. Recent developments in ADCIRC's real time automation system, the ADCIRC Surge Guidance System (ASGS), have now enabled real time modelling of active flood control scenarios (manipulation of pumps and flood gates) for decision support during riverine floods and tropical cyclone events. However, the overall computational burden for model guidance increases dramatically when considering additional scenarios that take into account the physics of flood fighting decisions. This burden will be greatly ameliorated by the STORM project, which seeks to enable ADCIRC on HPX, a new task-based runtime system with fine-grain parallelism, a global address space, and an  asynchronous programming model. A new system for validating the modernized code in real time will be described, along with results for a case study flood event: the historic opening of the Bonnet Carre spillway during the winter 2016 Mississippi river flooding in Louisiana.