科研之友
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摘要
Climate variability and expansion of communities and their infrastructure have increased vulnerability of coastal regions to flood. Flooding can cause failure of infrastructure, which could result in seriously interrupting or even paralyzing the daily life in those communities. Manhattan in New York City is a coastal metropolitan area surrounded by several waterbodies. Interactions among these waterbodies at the time of flooding significantly affect the water level fluctuation. Devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012 is evidence of how interconnected NYC waterbodies amplified the adverse effects on the shoreline and the coastal system. Proposing models to study the coastal areas where there are interactions among waterbodies that affect water level variations, and results in infrastructure vulnerability to flooding, is a challenge. In response to this challenge, the main objectives of this study are to simulate water-level variation in the New York Bay (lower Manhattan) during storm events, and to investigate the effect of storms on coastal infrastructure. For this purpose, by using the concept of system dynamics (SD), a dynamic simulation model (DSM) has been formulated to model the interactions among the water entities of the system for normal water level (harmonic tide) simulation. In the DSM framework, the governing equations among different waterbodies are used based on flood (forward) and ebb (backward) effects in each tidal cycle. The simulated water level by DSM is then fine-tuned using an artificial neural network (ANN) model, providing a better match between simulation results and the observed values. An envelope graph is then developed to simulate surge elevation at the time of storm in a representative station (Battery Park south of lower Manhattan). A load-resistance concept has been developed to investigate the effect of flood (storm) as load on the infrastructure resistance. Then, the probability of coastal infrastructure failure to flood load is determined. Results show the significant value of using a coupled SD-ANN platform to simulate water-level fluctuations at the time of storm. The developed load-resistance concept is a framework to link the simulated storm (load) to the resistance of lifelines (infrastructure) of coastal communities. This study targeted two important growing concerns in the coastal communities that can be further integrated, replicated, and extended in this and other similar settings.
- 出版日期2017-8
