Comparative Verification of Water Level Guidance Forecasts for the Middle Texas Coast

Accurate water level guidance forecasts are important to decision makers who live or interact within the land-sea interface. When water levels are anomalously high along the Middle Texas Coast, significant impacts occur and affect thousands of people. Flooded properties, closed beaches, and closed coastal roads are just some of the impacts that can result. Given these impacts, National Weather Service Corpus Christi marine forecasters need to understand verification performance of marine model water level guidance in order to produce the most accurate forecast possible for decision makers.

The performance of water level guidance forecasts produced by various operational and research marine models will be examined in this study. The models that will be evaluated will be the Extratropical Surge and Tide Operational Forecast System, Extra-Tropical Storm Surge model, Northern Gulf of Mexico Operational Forecast System, and Texas A&M Corpus Christi’s Artificial Neural Network model. The study period will be the times when minor coastal flooding was observed between 2015 and 2017. The threshold for minor coastal flooding along the Middle Texas Coast is 2 feet mean sea level observed at Bob Hall Pier in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Past performance of the Artificial Neural Network and Extratropical Surge and Tide Operational Forecast System models during minor coastal flooding events suggests that these particular models will produce the most accurate water level forecasts for the Middle Texas Coast.