MULTIVARIATE COASTAL HAZARD RESPONSE STOCHASTIC SIMULATION

Coastal structure risk analysis is sensitive to underlying physics and statistics. In post-Katrina U.S. studies, it has become increasingly apparent that statistical fidelity can be as important as physical fidelity to evaluate coastal structure responses to storm hazards as part of risk assessments. Fully probabilistic level III reliability techniques yield highly accurate results while also incorporating both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties. Novice application of these methods may seem intimidating; however, the StormSim tool suite eases the use of stochastic simulation for evaluation of coastal hazards and design of coastal structures. StormSim methods maintain multivariate statistical and physical interdependencies between coastal storm responses within a user-friendly, computationally efficient framework.