A digital hurricane surge atlas for New Orleans

This paper describes the development of a Hurricane Surge Atlas. This innovative tool is able to assess the surge threat of hurricanes in delta areas in a few minutes during emergency situation with a high degree of reliability. This tool has been developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which caused extensive damage (120 billion US $) and more than 1800 people were killed during this disaster in the Gulf region. A 14 billion US $ program has been executed by the US Army Corps of Engineers to reduce flood risk in the New Orleans region. For design of the Hurricane Risk Reduction Storm and Damage Risk Reduction System (HSDRRS), an extensive set of storm scenarios has been analyzed with detailed 2D numerical surge and wave models. The results have been analyzed statistically to determine the surge level and wave characteristics for different return periods. Apart from structural flood risk reduction measures, it has become apparent that state-of-art tools can further reduce flood risk in future hurricane situations.