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Vital Gulf monitoring gap filled

By JOE GYAN JR.
New Orleans bureau

NEW ORLEANS -- Greg Stone of LSU’s Coastal Studies Institute used the term "black hole" to describe the absence of weather buoys along the coastline from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Louisiana-Texas border.

But Wednesday, Stone told a symposium marking the 30th anniversary of Hurricane Camille that he and his Coastal Studies Institute colleagues are in the process of plugging that hole with a state-of-the-art program called WAVCIS, or Wave-Current Information System.

Stone said the WAVCIS monitoring stations will supplement the National Data Buoy Center weather buoys in the Gulf of Mexico.

The nearest NDBC buoys to Grand Isle are 60 miles to the east of the island and more than 300 miles to the south, he said.

"The entire stretch of coastline from Breton Sound to the Louisiana-Texas border is completely devoid of instrumentation capable of supplying accurate sea state conditions on a regular basis," he added.

Unlike the floating buoys that ride up and down with the waves and often can’t give an accurate picture of wave heights and storm surge, Stone said, the fixed WAVCIS monitoring stations can measure the all-important storm surge, the bulge of water pushed by hurricanes that is the main cause of destruction.

"There is no program anywhere like it in the state because we’re going after storm surge," he said.

Stone said there are three WAVCIS stations online in Terrebonne Bay and in Mississippi Sound.

Four more will go online later this summer or in the early fall in central Terrebonne Bay and south of the Timbalier Islands, he said.

The monitoring stations will be fixed to offshore oil platforms.

Information from each station will be transmitted to a base station at LSU, where it will undergo quality control, post-processing and archiving in an online database, Stone said.

The information then will be made available on the Web, he said.

Stone said WAVCIS will "enhance our predictive powers" when it comes to hurricanes.

"We will have near real-time information," he said, adding that in emergency situations, information can be made available to government agencies and emergency planners within 30 minutes to an hour after it is collected.

The monitoring stations measure wave height, storm surge, wind speed and direction, surface current speed and direction, barometric pressure and other conditions, Stone said.

Stone and his colleagues are working closely with Joseph Suhayda, director of the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at LSU.

Suhayda and his colleagues have developed a computerized storm surge simulation model to show what areas of south Louisiana will flood at what point during various hurricane tracks.

Suhayda demonstrated his storm surge model during the Camille conference Wednesday and said if Hurricanes Camille (August 1969), Andrew (August 1992) or Georges (September 1998) had followed slightly different paths, New Orleans would have been in major trouble.

"We could have had New Orleans flooded in each of those situations," he said.

South Lafourche Levee District General Manager Windell Curole drove that point home.

"If hurricanes of the magnitude of Hurricane Camille should hit the Louisiana coast, it would have a devastating effect," he said in a paper delivered to the symposium.

Sandy Ward Eslinger, a social scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal Services Center in Charleston, S.C., asked, "Were lessons really learned" from Camille.

Since Camille, Eslinger said, only minimal attention has been paid to the full range of vulnerabilities along the Gulf Coast. The Mississippi Gulf Coast population rose 41 percent from 1970 to 1995, she said.

"Over the past 30 years, the coastal region impacted by Hurricane Camille has changed dramatically. Coastal erosion combined with soaring commercial and residential development in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have all combined to significantly increase the vulnerability of the area to hurricane impacts," Eslinger said.

The Camille symposium, which began Tuesday and concluded Wednesday, was presented by the University of New Orleans.

Sponsors were UNO, NOAA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the governor’s Office of Coastal Activities, the Mississippi Office of Geology, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and The Weather Channel.