JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH: OCEANS, VOL. 118, 4424–4460, doi:10.1002/jgrc.20314, 2013 Hindcast and validation of Hurricane Ike (2008) waves, forerunner, and storm surge M. E. Hope,1 J. J. Westerink,1 A. B. Kennedy,1 P. C. Kerr,1 J. C. Dietrich,1,2 C. Dawson,3 C. J. Bender,4 J. M. Smith,5 R. E. Jensen,5 M. Zijlema,6 L. H. Holthuijsen,6 R. A. Luettich Jr.,7 M. D. Powell,8 V. J. Cardone,9 A. T. Cox,9 H. Pourtaheri,10 H. J. Roberts,11 J. H. Atkinson,11 S. Tanaka,1,12 H. J. Westerink,1 and L. G. Westerink1 Received 26 February 2013; revised 9 July 2013; accepted 12 July 2013; published 13 September 2013. [1] Hurricane Ike (2008) made landfall near Galveston, Texas, as a moderate intensity storm. Its large wind field in conjunction with the Louisiana-Texas coastline’s broad shelf and large scale concave geometry generated waves and surge that impacted over 1000 km of coastline. Ike’s complex and varied wave and surge response physics included: the capture of surge by the protruding Mississippi River Delta; the strong influence of wave radiation stress gradients on the Delta adjacent to the shelf break; the development of strong wind driven shore-parallel currents and the associated geostrophic setup; the forced early rise of water in coastal bays and lakes facilitating inland surge penetration; the propagation of a free wave along the southern Texas shelf; shore-normal peak wind-driven surge; and resonant and reflected long waves across a wide continental shelf. Preexisting and rapidly deployed instrumentation provided the most comprehensive hurricane response data of any previous hurricane. More than 94 wave parameter time histories, 523 water level time histories, and 206 high water marks were collected throughout the Gulf in deep water, along the nearshore, and up to 65 km inland. Ike’s highly varied physics were simulated using SWAN þ ADCIRC, a tightly coupled wave and circulation model, on SL18TX33, a new unstructured mesh of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and western Atlantic Ocean with high resolution of the Gulf’s coastal floodplain from Alabama to the Texas-Mexico border. A comprehensive validation was made of the model’s ability to capture the varied physics in the system. Citation: Hope, M. E., et al. (2013), Hindcast and validation of Hurricane Ike (2008) waves, forerunner, and storm surge, J. Geophys. Res. Oceans, 118, 4424–4460, doi:10.1002/jgrc.20314. 1. Introduction 1Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Scien- [2] The Louisiana and Texas (LATEX) Gulf Coast is sit- ces, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. uated in an area of high tropical storm activity. Major hurri- 2 Now at Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engi- canes making landfall along the LATEX coast include neering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. 3Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, University of storms in 1886 (unnamed; landfall at Indianola, TX), 1900 Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA. (unnamed; landfall at Galveston, TX), 1915 (unnamed; 4Taylor Engineering, Jacksonville, Florida, USA. landfall at Galveston, TX), 1961 (Carla), 1965 (Betsy), 5Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, U.S. Army Engineer Research and 1969 (Camille), 1980 (Allen), 1983 (Alicia), 2005 (Katrina Development Center, Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA. and Rita), 2008 (Gustav and Ike), and 2012 (Isaac). Hurri- 6Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands. cane Ike is of significant interest because of its size, its var- 7Institute of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel ied response physics, and the quantity and quality of wave Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. and water level data collected. 8 Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Labs, Hurricane Research [3] Hurricane Ike entered the Gulf of Mexico after making Division, NOAA Miami, Florida, USA. 9Oceanweather Inc., Cos Cob, Connecticut, USA. landfall in Cuba. Upon entering the Gulf at 2030 UTC 9 Sep- 10New Orleans District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans, tember 2008 (Table 1), Ike tracked northwest and its wind Louisiana, USA. field broadened and strengthened until reaching a 10 min sus- 11ARCADIS, Boulder, Colarado, USA. À1 12 tained wind speed of 37 m s and radius to maximum winds Now at Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, of 148 km at 0000 UTC 12 September 2008 (31 h before Japan. landfall), when the storm’s center was approximately 300 km Corresponding author: M. E. Hope, Department of Civil and Environ- south of Isles Dernieres, LA (Figure 1, Table 2), with tropical mental Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Notre Dame, 156 Fitzpatrick Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556-5637. ([email protected]) storm force winds extending 400 km from the storm’s center. At this point, significant wave heights were measured at over ©2013. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved. 8 m in the mid-Gulf, 6 m to the south of Grand Isle, LA, 2169-9275/13/10.1002/jgrc.20314 and 4 m off of Galveston Island. Approximately 13 h before 4424 HOPE ET AL.: HINDCAST AND VALIDATION OF HURRICANE IKE Table 1. Summary of Significant Times and Characteristics of Hurricane Ikea Hours Max Wind Radius to Minimum Relative UTC UTC Date Velocity Maximum Central Saffir-Simpson to Landfall Time (2008) Latitude Longitude (m/s) Winds (km) Pressure (mb) Category Notes À289 0600 1 Sep. 17.2 37 13 167 1006 Trop. Depression Formation À217 0600 4 Sep. 22.4 55.0 54 28 935 4 Maximum Intensity À194.5 0430 5 Sep. 23.6 60.4 50 28 945 4 Enters SL18þTX33 Domain À187 1200 5 Sep. 23.4 62.0 46 28 954 3 OWI winds start À138 1300 7 Sep. 21.0 73.2 49 947 3 Landfall on Great Inagua Island, Bahamas À124.75 0215 8 Sep. 21.1 75.7 50 945 4 Landfall in Holguin, Cuba À89 1400 9 Sep. 22.6 82.9 30 - 965 1 Landfall in Pinar del Rio, Cuba À82.5 2030 9 Sep. Enters Gulf of Mexico À31 0000 12 Sep. 26.1 90.0 37 148 954 2 À19 1200 12 Sep. 26.9 92.2 39 93 954 2 Peak in South Plaquemines À13 1800 12 Sep. 27.4 93.0 39 93 955 2 Shift in track, WSE peak in NOLA À7 0000 13 Sep. 28.3 94.1 41 74 952 2 WSE peak in Lake Pontchartrain 0 0700 13 Sep. 29.3 94.7 41 950 2 Landfall at Galveston, Texas 5 1200 13 Sep. 30.3 95.2 37 56 959 1 11 1800 13 Sep. 31.7 95.3 22 74 974 Trop. Storm 23 0600 14 Sep. 35.5 93.7 15 93 986 Trop. Depression OWI winds end 53 1200 15 Sep. End of simulation aWinds are 10 min average [Berg, 2009] (Automated Tropical Cyclone Forecast Archive: ftp://ftp.nhc.noaa.gov/atcf/). landfall, Ike began to shift and track north-northwestward, measured surge at landfall of 5.3 m in Chambers County, then making landfall at Galveston Island, TX, with a maxi- TX, located to the northeast of Galveston Island (Figure 1) mum wind speed of 41 m sÀ1. Ike generated a maximum [FEMA, 2008]. Across the LATEX coast, Ike produced surge Figure 1. Map of Northern Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana-Texas Coast. The black line represents Ike’s track; ADCIRC grid boundaries and raised features are brown; the coastline is solid gray; bathymetric contours (as labeled) are dashed gray. Geographic locations of significance are labeled by numbers identified in Table 2. 4425 HOPE ET AL.: HINDCAST AND VALIDATION OF HURRICANE IKE Table 2. Geographic Locations by Type and Location able under hurricane conditions. Additionally, the use of short-term deployable gages placed prestorm nearshore and River and Channels inland increased the density of recorded data across the 1 Mississippi River Bird’s foot coast. As a result of these efforts, the number, density, and 2 Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) extent of wave and water level gages that collected data 3 Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (IHNC) throughout the storm surpassed that of any previous storm. 4 Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) [5] The wave measurements describe generation in deep Water Bodies water, transformation nearshore, and dissipation onshore 5 Chandeleur Sound and are summarized in Table 3.. NOAA National Data 6 Lake Borgne 7 Lake Pontchartrain Buoy Center (NDBC; http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/) wave 8 Lake Maurepas data at 13 stations includes offshore buoys on the continen- 9 Barataria Bay tal shelf as well as in the deep Gulf; Louisiana State Uni- 10 Terrebonne Bay versity’s Coastal Studies Institute (CSI; http:// 11 Vermillion Bay www.csi.lsu.edu/) recorded wave data at five nearshore 12 Calcasieu Lake gages off the coast of Southern Louisiana; Andrew Ken- 13 Sabine Lake nedy (AK) from the University of Notre Dame deployed 14 Galveston Bay eight gages via helicopter off the Texas coast from Sabine 15 Corpus Christi Bay Lake to San Antonio Bay in depths ranging from 8.5 to 16 Locations m[Kennedy et al., 2012]; the U.S. Army Corps of Engi- 16 Chandeleur Islands 17 Biloxi Marsh neers Research and Development Center Coastal Hydraul- 18 Caernarvon Marsh ics Laboratory (USACE-CHL) deployed six gages in the 19 Plaquemines Parish, LA Terrebonne and Biloxi marshes that were placed to under- 20 New Orleans stand the dissipation of waves over wetlands. 21 Terrebonne Marsh [6] Water level time series, Table 3., were collected 22 Grand Isle throughout the LATEX shelf and adjacent floodplain by: the 23 Isles Dernieres, LA U.S.