MS Plan B Defense: Modeling of hurricane waves for design of coastal infrastructure

Giannicola Tumino Di Costanzo
Graduate Student
Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

The subtropical Hawaiian Islands are subject to occasional hurricanes that bring the risk of infrastructure damage and financial loss. Determination of hurricane wave conditions in terms of return period is important for coastal infrastructure design and risk management. This study assembles and validates a hurricane wave model and utilizes the model to determine probabilistic design wave conditions for a study site at west Maui. The Delft3D software, which includes a parametric hurricane model and SWAN (Simulating Waves Nearshore), is used to determine significant wave heights and peak periods on a system of nested computational grids from input hurricane track data. Using this modeling package, historical hurricanes are modeled and the results are validated with recorded datasets. Due to a limited number of historical landfalls, a quasi-1000-year dataset of simulated hurricanes from climate model downscaling in the eastern and central Pacific basin is used in establishing design parameters. By using the validated model and simulated track data, the wave conditions are computed for selected hurricanes that pass through an influence area around the study site. The computed wave heights are ranked and the corresponding periods are retained to define the 50, 100, 200, and 500-year return events. This methodology is shown to be effective in determining probabilistic hurricane wave parameters for engineering design and risk management.

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