Simulation of the North Indian Ocean Tropical Cyclones Using the Regional Environment Simulator: Application to Cyclone Nargis in 2008

Abstract

Countries facing the North Indian Ocean (NIO) are threatened by the storm surges associated with tropical cyclonic storms. Several studies have been performed for the storm surge simulation in the NIO. Examples of studies confined to the Bay of Bengal are those performed by Das (1972), John and Ali (1980), and of studies confined to the Arabian Sea Dube et al. (2004) developed a location-specific vertically integrated shallow water model that covers the northern part of the Bay of Bengal with a horizontal grid resolution of 3 km to study the storm surge of cyclones in 1974, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1994, and 1999. Dube et al. (2004) used an idealized wind stress forcing that had been computed by the empirical formula given by Jelesnianski (1972). Developed a location-specific storm surge model for the coastal regions of Myanmar to carry out simulations for the 1975-Pathein, 1982-Gwa, 1992-Sandoway, and 1994-Sittewe cyclones. The model had horizontal grid resolution of 9 km and the idealized wind stress forcing computed by the wind model. Kim et al. (2008) developed a wind-wave-surge coupled process-based model for simulating the storm surge. The model consists of a meso-scale atmospheric model, a third-generation wave model and an ocean circulation model. Kim et al. (2008) introduced an additional sea-surface shear stress by wave dissipation into the current model considering energy transfer from winds to currents through whitecapping breaking.