USC Coastal Engineering

The (virtual) International Conference on Coastal Engineering (vICCE) starts next week. We are trying something new in 2020 - all presentations will be available online, and registration is FREE. We have ~300 technical presentations and 15 Keynotes, and are expecting more than 2,500 attendees. Prof. Lynett is organizing the vICCE - get in touch with him if you have any questions.
More information including registration instructions are here: https://vicce.live/.

A short video of Prof. Patrick Lynett and the rest of the research team discussing the Icy Bay Mega Tsunami and field survey in Taan Fjord, Alaska.

Icy Bay Mega Tsunami "Oct. 17, 2015, Taan Fjord, Icy Bay, Alaska. The friction that held silt to silt and rock to rock began giving way. Those first rocks shoved more rocks, and ...

Prof. Patrick Lynett with PhD students Zili Zhou and Ezgi Çınar, along with visiting scholar Prof. Sangyoung Son, spent the day taking observations of waves and currents from the large swell event at Ventura Harbor. The waves were 3-4 m at 18 seconds, and created dangerous conditions at the harbor entrance. Check out the video below to see the waves overtopping the breakwater, and the incredibly strong longshore current funneled between the jetty and the breakwater. One of our main reasons for taking this data is to validate the USC coastal waves prediction model for Ventura Harbor, which can be seen here:
http://coastal.usc.edu/waves/

Many thanks to John Higgins and the Ventura Harbor Patrol for their assistance and access.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmiPmx-vwk0&feature=youtu.be

Drone Video of the Ventura Harbor Entrance Channel on 1/10/2019 Aerial video of the large swell event of Jan 10th, 2019. This video shows the Ventura Harbor entrance, which experienced dangerous waves and currents. Waves ...

Prof. Costas Synolakis quoted in NBC article about Anak Krakatau tsunami. Best guess right now is that the recent eruption caused the southern flank of the cone to collapse, generating a tsunami.

Why a tsunami struck Indonesia without warning "This was not a common tsunami," said Costas Synolakis, director of USC's Tsunami Research Center. "This was a volcanic tsunami."

Its been an unfortunately active season of coastal disasters, and our group is out in the field trying to learn from them. Right now, Prof. Costas Synolakis is in Palu, Indonesia with Nikos Kalligeris, and next week Prof. Patrick Lynett will be in Florida surveying the Hurricane Michael damage.

USC team publishes in Nature Scientific Reports about a large landslide in Alaska, and the nearly 200 meter high tsunami it generated:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30475-w
The slide was largely due to a rapidly retreating glacier in the fjord. The fjord isn't habited, and no one was injured by the tsunami. USC authors include Patrick Lynett, Adam Keen, Aykut Ayca, and Vassilios Skanavis

The 2015 landslide and tsunami in Taan Fiord, Alaska Article

Check out the California coastal wave forecast page, using the Celeris model developed by PhD student Sasan Tavakkol: http://coastal.usc.edu/waves/
Right now, the forecast cycles through just the locations in the list seen on the above link. If you click on one of these locations, you will see the forecast. For each location, we forecast the coastal wave field at 7:00 am and 4:00 pm for the next five days. The forecast consists of an animation of the wave field, showing the wave shoaling/refraction/diffraction/breaking. It is the hope that these types of forecasts will be useful to understand what the wave field will look like, and where breaking can be expected.

USC Coastal Waves Forecast