Modeling hurricane waves and storm surge using integrally-coupled, scalable computations

The unstructured-mesh SWAN spectral wave model and the ADCIRC shallow-water circulation model have been integrated into a tightly-coupled SWAN + ADCIRC model. The model components are applied to an identical, unstructured mesh; share parallel computing infrastructure; and run sequentially in time. Wind speeds, water levels, currents and radiation stress gradients are vertex-based, and therefore can be passed through memory or cache to each model component. Parallel simulations based on domain decomposition utilize identical sub-meshes, and the communication is highly localized. Inter-model communication is intra-core, while intra-model communication is inter-core but is local and efficient because it is solely on adjacent sub-mesh edges. The resulting integrated SWAN + ADCIRC system is highly scalable and allows for localized increases in resolution without the complexity or cost of nested meshes or global interpolation between heterogeneous meshes. Hurricane waves and storm surge are validated for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, demonstrating the importance of inclusion of the wave-circulation interactions, and efficient performance is demonstrated to 3062 computational cores.