RISE Program Spotlight: Jack Voight

Throughout the summer, several students are taking part in CCEE’s Research Internship Summer Experience (RISE) program, conducting research while being mentored by faculty, post-doctoral fellows and advanced graduate students.

Jack Voight, a rising junior studying environmental engineering, is working with Associate Professor Casey Dietrich and the coastal and computational hydraulics team. One of the projects he is assisting with is focused on comparing predictions of total water levels along the coast, which involves running simulations of the flooding in southeast Virginia during Hurricane Irene in 2011.

The CCEE researchers are part of a larger team with experts in several types of models for total water levels (tides and storm surge and wave setup and wave runup). The CCEE model is strong in predicting storm surge and flooding over large regions, such as the coasts of one or more states, whereas other models are strong in predicting how surge combines with wave run-up to increase the water levels on a specific beach and dune. CCEE researchers are working to understand and quantify these relative strengths so stakeholders can better select models for their sites.