Perfect Storms: A Regional Earth System Modeling Platform for Coastal Hazards in the Gulf of Mexico

Speaker: Z. George Xue, Ph. D., Associate Professor, Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University

With a changing climate, the northern Gulf of Mexico suffers from various coastal hazards, including sea-level rise and land loss, eutrophication and hypoxia, ocean acidification, hurricanes, and compound flooding. A key toolset to untangle the various processes involved in these coastal disasters is a Regional Earth System Model that incorporates atmospheric, oceanic, and river processes as well as, most importantly, the interaction among them. The open-source, community-developed Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Waves Sediment Transport (COAWST) modeling dynamically couples multiple models, including the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN), WAVEWATCH III, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, the INfragravity WAVE model (INWAVE), and the Community Sediment Transport Modeling System (CSTMS). Recently, a process-based land surface/hydrological model (WRF-Hydro) has been incorporated into the COAWST platform and enables the dynamical coupling between ocean and land processes. I will demonstrate several recent developments and applications of COAWST in the Gulf of Mexico, which include hydrodynamics, sedimentation, nutrient and carbon cycling, and compound flooding during several hurricane events. These studies feature the coupling among air-sea, physical-biogeochemical, atmosphere-ocean-wave-sediment-nutrient, and hydrological-oceanic processes. They demonstrate the feasibility of regional earth system model development and its potential for the management of coastal hazards.