On Tuesday 4
th October, just two days into our studies at the University of Southampton, the new cohort of MSc ECE and COMEM students were invited to the first talk of this year’s
Coastal Seminar Series. We were delighted to welcome Dr. Yasha Hetzel from the University of Western Australia
to discuss his postdoctoral research on ‘Assessing the ability of storm surge models to include wave setup and coastal trapped waves around Australia’. Australia is the focus of much research into coastal flooding and extreme sea levels due to a history of costly natural disasters arising from tropical and extratropical cyclones. It was fascinating to learn how numerical models are being used to better understand these events. Dr Yasha Hetzel’s described how we can improve storm surge models by incorporating wave setup and coastally trapped waves, two components which have often been ignored. Model simulations of historical tropical cyclones, such as Alby (1978) and Yasi (2011), as well as other winter and extratropical storms were presented and compared with observations to highlight the importance of these two components in storm surge events.
We would like to thank Yasha for visiting Southampton and providing us with the talk. As a new ECE student it was a great opportunity to hear about the active research into understanding extreme sea levels so early into the course. We now look forward to the next guest talk by Prof. Ken Pye on Tues 25th Oct…
Southampton MsC ECE 