Storm surge propagation in Galveston Bay during Hurricane Ike

We studied Hurricane Ike's storm surge along the Texas–Louisiana coast using the fully nonlinear Finite-Volume Coastal Ocean Model (FVCOM, by Chen et al., 2003) with a high-resolution unstructured mesh. The model was validated with USGS surge data collected during Hurricane Ike. This study focused on 1) how the surge wave propagates into and within Galveston Bay and 2) the importance of the bay's barrier system. Ike's coastal surge propagated alongshore due east towards Louisiana, partly because of Bolivar Peninsula, which, together with Galveston Island, provided a barrier protecting the bay. In the upper bay, a west–east oscillation of water surface gradient of about 0.08 m/km was found and studied. We then varied Bolivar Peninsula's topography for different simulations, examining the role of barrier islands on surge propagation into the bay. Results suggest that when the Peninsula's height (or volume) was reduced to about 45% of the original, with two breaches, the bay was exposed to dangerously high water levels almost as much as those if the Peninsula was leveled to just 0.05 m above the Mean Sea Level, underlining the nonlinear nature of this bay-barrier system.