A Detailed Hydrodynamic Study to Help Community Based Resiliency Planning Under Extreme Climatic and Weather Event

The State of New Jersey is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather and climatic events. This study concentrates on spatial and temporal vulnerability of these events using climate and hydrodynamic modeling. The first chapter focuses on historical climatic trend of temperature and precipitation as well as the future scenarios using 10 bias corrected climate model output considering high end emission scenario derived from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). In the second chapter a coastal hydrodynamic model called ADCIRC-2DDI was implemented to assess the impact of hurricanes in the Western North Atlantic (WNAT) model domain. The efficiency of the model in representing the complex interaction between storm-tide was assessed considering hurricane SANDY as a historical event. Multiple scenarios were also created to assess the impact of different categories of hurricane for Atlantic City, NJ. The last chapter deals with the inland flooding during extreme storm event. A 2D hydrodynamic model based on Shallow Water Equation (SWE) called TUFLOW was implemented to identify the dynamic spatial and temporal extent of inland flooding. Results from the TUFLOW were coupled with a traffic micro-simulation model to help emergency evacuation planning to help the vulnerable communities with decision making process.