Development of meshes for compound flood simulation for the texas coast

The Texas coast is subjected to frequent storms leading to floods in the yearly hurricane season. To provide forecasts of hurricane storm surge, a shallow water equation solver, the Advanced CIRCulation model, Luettich (1992) is used. The current state-of-the-art ADCIRC meshes for the Texas coast used in forecasting were developed about a decade ago, see, Hope (2013). ADCIRC uses unstructured meshes that require significant tailoring to ensure accurate and physically relevant solutions. The current mesh used in forecasting has very high resolution on the Texas coast for accuracy and numerical stability, whereas areas far away from Texas are of low resolution for computational efficiency. The applicability and accuracy of these meshes is regularly verified to be used in operational storm surge forecasting.