Coastal management update

An update on research progress from projects in the Coastal Management cluster.

Developing better predictions for extreme water levels

The team has expanded the hydrodynamic model to simulate storm surges all around the continent, with initial simulations focusing on January and February 2011 when a number of events occurred over a two week period. These included Tropical Cyclone Bianca in Western Australia and Tropical Cyclone's Anthony and Yasi in Queensland, along with a number of cold fronts and local surges in South Australia and Tasmania.

Ongoing work will identify and simulate storms that generated the highest water levels in each state. The model has also been successfully coupled with a wave model, allowing for the determination of coastal areas where wave setup is important to total water levels. The team presented a summary of the work at the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and AFAC conference in Adelaide in early September (access here), and will give a number of talks at the 2015 Coast and Ports Conference in Auckland describing risk from transitioning tropical cyclones, the benefits of including waves in simulations and meteotsunamis.

Storm surge: resilience to clustered disaster events on the coast

The project has recently had two abstracts accepted for conferences and had a poster at the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC and AFAC conference in Adelaide.

The two abstracts have also been accepted as papers, with the first paper submitted to the MODSIM conference in December 2015 on the Gold Coast (Statistical modelling of extreme ocean climate with incorporation of storm clustering), and the second paper submitted for the International Coastal Symposium to be held in Sydney in March 2016 (A Framework for Modelling Shoreline Response to Clustered Storm Events: Case Studies from Southeast Australia).

The project team has continued working towards its milestones. Geoscience Australia has been undertaking QA/QC on the primary and secondary coastal compartments to be released as a spatial data set, and Geoscience Australia has established the method to generate storm event time series data for each site. The method has been discussed and tested with the University of Queensland and the NSW Office of Environment and Hertigate.