The Indian River Lagoon (IRL), which extends over 175 miles north-to-south along the central east coast of Florida from Ponce de Leon Inlet to Jupiter Inlet, is a shallow estuary with limited salt water input. Because of its shallow depth and limited ocean access, wind-drive tides are general more important. The NWS Melbourne office currently uses rules of thumb to forecast wave conditions along the IRL in Brevard and Indian River counties here in Florida. The primary goal of this project is to develop the foundations for a model system to predict set-up/set-down in the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) for a range of wind scenarios where high wind and the resulting response across the lagoon is a concern.
A complementary Partners Project will develop the ensemble of meteorological forcing components for this study. This second hydrodynamic component consists of generating an unstructured mesh to serve as the model domain that will include the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) from Port Canaveral to Sebastian Inlet. The new domain will be used to compute the hydrodynamic response of the IRL to forecast wind ensembles generated by the meteorological component of this proposal. The (parallel) ADvanced CIRCulation model for oceanic, coastal and estuarine waters, ADCIRC, will be used to compute the hydrodynamic response of the lagoon to the meteorological forcing. For this project, the researchers are particularly interested in the computed sea surface elevation. Maximum water elevations achieved during the entire duration at every point in the domain will be saved for each model simulation. Once each simulation for a given wind event is complete, these maximum elevations will be combined into a Maximum Envelope of Water (MEOW) reflecting the maximum surface elevation achieved at any point over each of the ensemble simulations. In addition to analyzing the maximum water levels, the researchers will also generate two-dimensional contours of minimum water level. Hydrographs representing the probabilistic water level envelope at selected station locations will be compared against the hindcast simulation results as well as the actual historic station data (if available). A couple of high wind events will be selected to serve as a testbed for evaluation.