Functional forecasting: University of Rhode Island team uses Homeland Security exercises to evaluate storm decision support tool as part of Katrina lookback issue
URI’s CHAMP tool and expertise highlighted in series, '20 years after Hurricane Katrina: Lessons learned and implemented in flood risk management'
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URI offers tools to meet Rhode Island’s resilience and emergency management needs: CHAMP predicted flooding on a Newport street during a 2022 nor’easter.
view moreCredit: URI CHAMP
In a new paper in the Journal of Coastal and Riverine Flood Risk, a team from the University of Rhode Island discusses the novel application of Homeland Security exercises to evaluate emergency managers’ use of their simulation support tools to improve response to major coastal storms such as Hurricane Katrina.
They ran their models based on Hurricane Henri, which hit the northeastern U.S. in 2021, but the paper was inspired by a 20-year lookback at Katrina and the damage it wrought on New Orleans. User feedback and observation data were used to inform real-world activation protocols and guide ongoing development of CHAMP (Coastal Hazards Analysis, Modeling, and Prediction).
For one of the paper’s lead authors, Samuel Adams, a marine affairs Ph.D. candidate in URI’s Marine Affairs Coastal Resilience Lab — and also URI’s Emergency Management Director — considering the impact of Katrina is not only an academic exercise, it’s personal.
A native of New Orleans, Adams came to Rhode Island for college, but says, “NOLA will always be home.” His parents’ home was so damaged, he was there for a week after the storm dealing with their house while the city was evacuated. Adams was working as a firefighter and EMT at the time in Bristol, R.I.
“That experience was the primary catalyst that led to my career in emergency management, and ultimately inspired me to pursue my Ph.D. in this area,” Adams comments. “I looked around me and knew there had to be a better way.”
Adams joined with his colleagues in marine affairs and Graduate School of Oceanography professor Isaac Ginis, who helped develop a hurricane-ocean model for the National Hurricane Center / NOAA when Katrina hit. National Geographic magazine featured his team’s work in its special edition on Hurricane Katrina and the National Science Foundation funded his team’s development of the educational website hurricanescience.org, in collaboration with the Louisiana State Museum, now widely used by educators around the country.
Today, Ginis, Adams and their URI colleagues in Marine Affairs and Rhode Island Sea Grant are looking ahead to make sure southeastern New England is not caught off guard, as New Orleans was. They say that tools like URI’s CHAMP can help emergency managers and simulation experiences can help mainstream their use; such programs were not available 20 years ago, but they are now — and Rhode Island is leading in this area. URI even exported the program to coastal Connecticut recently and could do the same for other regions. In Rhode Island, CHAMP is funded by the state to conduct real-time forecasting of all tropical and extratropical (nor’easters) storms affecting the Ocean State.
To help emergency managers here become more comfortable and knowledgeable about the programs’ capabilities, URI’s team utilized the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP), the universally accepted standard for emergency management exercises in the United States and a template familiar to emergency management practitioners.
Practice as you play
Working with Ginis and his colleagues in professor Austin Becker’s Marine Affairs Coastal Resilience Lab, Adams’ team presented the results of two HSEEP-based exercises they ran. The team used 2021’s Hurricane Henri as their model storm, one that the CHAMP program actually forecast in real time that year for RIEMA. Since then, they have forecast several nor’easters in real time.
URI’s team designed exercises for local emergency managers to deploy CHAMP in response to a tropical storm striking Rhode Island, with realistic, plausible impacts predicted. The exercises were held at URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus and the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Cranston, and focused on the entire State of Rhode Island. The east-west orientation of Rhode Island’s coastline, and the north-south orientation of Narragansett Bay, leaves 21 of 39 municipalities exposed to storm surge, making the “Ocean State” uniquely vulnerable to the effects of tropical cyclones.
“These kind of simulation-and-consequence prediction tools have the potential to transform the practice of emergency managers,” says Adams, noting that sophisticated tools like those found at URI can geolocate vulnerabilities and simulate the effects of weather hazards including storms that local communities may not have experienced in the past.
Some municipalities found that CHAMP’s models showed their towns being cut off by flood waters at certain points in a storm. For example, the towns of Bristol and Warren, located on a peninsula, would become an island cut off from emergency services and unable to evacuate. This created an additional imperative to make early decisions about evacuating vulnerable populations and implementing contingency plans to maintain essential services until outside help would reach them.
“Climate change is showing us that we can no longer depend on past storms as indicators of future risk,” Adams says. “We need better decision support tools that can help us anticipate and prepare for eventualities that haven’t happened previously. If we fail to do so, we are going to experience ‘surprise’ events like Katrina, or Helene in Western North Carolina, with increasing frequency and escalating destruction.”
This work was supported by the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security, using data from the URI Marine Affairs Coastal Resilience Lab.
Journal
Journal of Coastal and Riverine Flood Risk
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Practice as You Play: Using Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) Exercises to Evaluate a Storm Decision Support Tool
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