As Hurricane Matthew approaches Florida and prepares to move up the U.S. east coast, researchers in North Carolina are running models to forecast the storm surge and coastal flooding. Dr. Casey Dietrich is working with collaborators at the University of North Carolina, the Renaissance Computing Institute, and Seahorse Coastal Consulting to generate and share guidance during the storm. The models are run every 6 hours, and they provide high-resolution forecasts of possible flooding throughout the NC coast.

The forecasts can be found at: http://nc-cera.renci.org/.

Dietrich is providing forecast guidance to NC Emergency Management, for use in decisions about evacuation and resource deployment. This real-time forecasting is part of a research project to downscale the model results and provide them in formats tailored to the needs of emergency managers. For more information about this project, please visit Dietrich’s research web site.