A Channel-to-Basin Scale ADCIRC Based Hydrodynamic Unstructured Mesh Model for the US East and Gulf of Mexico Coasts

The current Extratropical Surge and Tides Forecast System (ESTOFS) used to estimate water level along the East and Gulf of Mexico Coasts of the US has shown accurate results in the deep ocean and across the shelf; however, its oversimplified representation of the complex nearshore region prevents an adequate representation of the nearshore hydrodynamics and hinders the incorporation of the inland river network. We used the most recent mesh generation tools to implement a new version of ESTOFS that includes geographic extensions penetrating far into upriver systems up to 10 m above the Mean Sea Level (MSL). This report describes the implementation and validation of the mesh named as the East Coast Gulf of Mexico Coast Model (ECGC) ECGC_120m_2021_v01. The model reduces the minimum resolution from 250 m used in ESTOFS to 120 m and incorporates a significant portion of the inland channels in the nearshore region. In addition, we eliminated over-resolution by considering the overall model cost when designing meshing strategies.