LSU researchers used a unique coupled computer modeling approach to accurately recreate the coastal flooding that occurred during Hurricane Florence, demonstrating that it is more accurate than traditional modeling approaches.
When Hurricane Florence hit the coast of North Carolina as a Category 1 storm in 2018, it set new records for rainfall, creating damaging 500-year flooding events along the Cape Fear River Basin.
This is exactly the sort of weather event Z. George Xue of the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, or DOCS, believes his novel coupled computer modeling approach can more accurately predict, and thereby assist communities with disaster planning. Xue said as far as he knows, his lab is the only one using this technique.
Xue, along with DOCS graduate student Daoyang Bao and the rest of their research team, recently published a study using the events of Hurricane Florence to demonstrate the validity of this new approach in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.
Read more at Louisiana State University
Image: Z. George Xue says this current coupled model represents a new stage in an idea he's been working on for almost twenty years. (Credit: Louisiana State University)