{"id":21846,"date":"2015-08-28T16:17:21","date_gmt":"2015-08-28T20:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/?p=5474"},"modified":"2024-05-21T15:54:16","modified_gmt":"2024-05-21T19:54:16","slug":"keeping-a-watchful-eye-on-erika","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/keeping-a-watchful-eye-on-erika\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping a Watchful Eye on Erika"},"content":{"rendered":"
Posted Aug. 28, 2015<\/em><\/p>\n Casey Dietrich is a faculty member in North Carolina State University’s Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering. He focuses on the development of computational models for wind, waves and coastal circulation, and their application to high-resolution simulations of ocean behavior.<\/em><\/p>\n Research supported by\u00a0North Carolina Sea Grant\u00a0is feeding into emergency planning efforts as Tropical Storm Erika tracks toward the continental United States.<\/p>\n Even as the storm is hundreds of miles away, I am part of a team providing guidance for hurricane waves and coastal flooding \u2014 information shared directly with emergency managers and weather forecasters to support their decisions to be made within North Carolina.<\/p>\n This is a great opportunity to share our research in a meaningful way. We want our models to be useful, and we want to use our experiences during storm events to improve our models over a longer time frame.<\/p>\n When a storm is forecasted to affect our coastline, the Coastal Emergency Risks Assessment<\/a> group uses computer models to simulate the behavior of the coastal ocean. These models rely on the official forecasts from the National Hurricane Center<\/a> for the storm’s track, size and intensity, and then they predict its impacts on the waves and storm surge.<\/p>\n The forecast guidance is shared directly with county-level emergency managers, forecasters at the regional offices of the National Weather Service<\/a>, and engineers with the N.C. Department of Public Safety<\/a>. These groups also share with other critical state agencies, such as the N.C. Department of Transportation<\/a> and federal partners such as the National Park Service<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a>