Contact: Jim Mitchell
(225) 379-1881

BATON ROUGE, La. – The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) hosted a workshop today conducted by the National Hurricane Center to educate state and local officials about storm surge hazards in light of updated elevation mapping in south Louisiana.

The workshop was held at 1 p.m. at the DOTD Headquarters Building, located at 1201 Capitol Access Road in Baton Rouge.

New elevation data for the entire hurricane protection system in southeast Louisiana has recently been compiled by the LSU Center for Geoinformatics at the request of DOTD. State-of-the-art 3-D positioning was made possible using LSU’s GULFNet Real-Time Global Positioning System Network.

Elevation data was gathered on more than 750 miles of levees, floodwalls, sheetpiles and for 1,000 miles of roads. The new data has been used by the National Oceanography and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service to update the storm surge modeling for coastal Louisiana, including the New Orleans and Houma metropolitan areas.

By using the new data, a new hindcast was performed for Hurricane Katrina that revealed more realistic results. By seeing the results, participants of the workshop were able to gain greater appreciation of potential flooding risks for southern Louisiana.

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