Making storm warnings more exact, useful

is also the college’s vice president for information technology — set out to use that computing horsepower to generate scientific data hard enough to make the warnings something more than abstract.

“For people to believe it, we wanted to do a computer simulation to show what could happen if a storm hit with just the right eye track, with the right winds and tides all coinciding at the same time,” Fritz says.

The goal was precision: a computer model that would project just where the water would go, and how high — neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block — in a storm surge of twelve feet.

Over the next nine months, the CSI scientists fed millions of data points into the supercomputers, turning an admixture of geology, oceanography, climatology and land surveys into a set of highly specific projections. They were invited to present their findings to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in North Carolina in November.

Then, just a week before the meeting, Sandy hit. It was the superstorm, the one that put Staten Island on the map of hurricane catastrophes. Twenty-three people died on Staten Island, all but three of them by drowning, the most of any borough. Thousands lost their homes, many CSI students, faculty and staff among them — devastation comparable to Katrina. It was the real worst-case scenario, at least for now.

The day after the storm, Alan Benimoff went out to a low-lying neighborhood just south of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to look for the highest point of the surge and see how close the CSI computer model came to projecting it. “I went from house to house to see where the debris field stopped,” he says. “The highest was at the house at 256 Sand Lane. FEMA came out later with a map that showed the top surge going right through that house.” Most remarkable, though, was how close CSI’s computer modeling came to the actual height of the surge at that house — and at many others. On street after street, the computer model predicted flooding to within a foot of the actual surges — far more accurate than previous estimates with less sophisticated methods.

The CSI team was the buzz of the geological meeting. To Fritz and his colleagues, however, the study could go only so far on its own. For it to be more than a scientific triumph, they had to