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Coastal Surge Methodology
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, through agreements with the National Institute of Building Sciences, has developed HAZUS, a tool for simulating the effects of floods, hurricanes and earthquake in the United States. This state-of-the-art tool is PC‑based and uses a Geographic Information System (GIS) to map and display information. Estimates of the potential damages and losses from natural hazards computed by HAZUS are used by local, state, and regional officials for planning and mitigation to reduce losses and to prepare for emergency response and decision support. This tool provides practitioners and policy makers with the information needed to make those decisions.
Major features of HAZUS are a substantial national inventory data base, census tract level of resolution, classification systems for buildings and lifelines, data on natural hazards, mathematical formulas for calculating damage and loss, and economic data. HAZUS displays inventory, damage, and loss data in summary tables and full-color maps.
Future Coastal Surge Model
NASA-developed technology is being used as the basis for developing an advanced coastal risk model in HAZUS. The new methods will be a significant improvement in measuring coastal wind and flooding risk during hurricanes and will provide a framework for evaluating the cost effectiveness of hurricane mitigation programs for coastal communities. It will be used for assessing the physical and socio-economic effects of various building mitigation options and will provide a much improved capability and accuracy for local communities to be able to assess the risk and the resulting damage.
The coastal model will combine the effects of hurricane wind, storm surge, tide, and waves in the hurricane model of HAZUS. The new model will use existing state-of-the-art technology and, when combined with the hurricane risk model of HAZUS, will result in the first ever hazard model for the predicting risk, damage and loss along the entire hurricane prone coastline of the United States and is a significant advance in the state-of-the-art of coastal risk assessment.
Hurricane Induced Waves
Current Development
Enhancements continue on the HAZUS software to improve its performance in terms of the speed and accuracy of the analyses and to continue essential coordination with changes to ArcGIS. A new maintenance release, HAZUS-MH MR3, was recently issued by FEMA.
User Support
Technical support is available to users over the phone and fax and through email. FEMA also sponsors training and many local HAZUS User Groups (HUGS) are sources of support. |
