Storm Surge Risk In Vietnam

Project Overview

Central Vietnam is one of the areas that suffer from serious damaging caused by frequent typhoons. Strong typhoons associated with large storm surges significantly damaged infrastructure in coastal regions, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people and a considerable number of death.

 Our aim is to use the geological and geomorphic evidence of typhoon landfall to identify past events.

We will use new technique to investigate multiple storm deposit at beaches of Hue and Danang – two big cities in Central Vietnam, to understand the characteristics of areas inundated by typhoons.

First, we will use a number of hydrodynamic models (a storm surge model or coastal inundation model) to calculate how high storm surges are likely to be and how far they will go inland. Then, we will combine the model with geological records created by two strong typhoons happened recently, i.e. Xangsane (2006) and Ketsana (2009) to reconstruct inundation characteristic of the study area from past events, thus identify the recurrence of such typhoon.

We want to quantify and communicate the vulnerability of Vietnam coastline toward the catastrophic event in order to reduce the risks of the society from storm surges.