Next Generation of Coastal Ocean Operational Systems: Street-Scale Flood Forecasts for the Urban Ocean in the New York–New Jersey Metropolitan Region

Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Ike (2008), Irene (2011), and Sandy (2012) along the US Gulf and East Coasts have demonstrated the need of forecasting inundation in coastal cities and towns in real time. Although dynamical models at street scale require very high resolution, the computing power available today is becoming sufficient to operationally run these models. Here, we describe and validate a coastal ocean operational system that includes flood forecasting at street scale in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan region. This system is the latest extension of the Stevens Flood Advisory System (SFAS, http://stevens.edu/SFAS), a highly detailed, well-validated, operational coastal ocean modeling system. SFAS consists of three sets of nested coastal and inland flood models with a forecast horizon of at least 96 h are reinitialized every 6 h based on different atmospheric model predictions of surface meteorological factors, such as near-surface winds, barometric pressure, and rainfall. The last set of models includes 10 very high-resolution (< 10 m) computational grid areas around critical infrastructure sites, such as airports and marine terminals. These models are based on the parallel version of the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Estuarine and Coastal Ocean Model (sECOM), which includes wetting and drying, and variable drainage as a function of terrain. The system was retrospectively evaluated by forecasting the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy using sea level time series from a network of sensors, high water marks measured after the event, and spatial inundation extents obtained by reanalysis.