Internships

Adam Fisch ’15

A common problem coastal cities face is storm surge created by passing typhoons or hurricanes. During my summer internship with the Nordenson/Stone Collaborative Research Group, I studied parts of the physical dynamics behind storm surge and how surges form. Part of my work also focused on researching how climate change will affect hurricane patterns in the future in terms of magnitude and frequency. A major component of my group’s work focused on developing new protective and creative strategies for the city of Shanghai in China. As background, I learned about different innovative strategies that people have used around the world in places like Rotterdam, London, and New Orleans. My co-intern and I examined various characteristics of Shanghai, including its urban structure, local geography, flooding tendencies, and harbor bathymetry, and helped integrate some of what we found into an extensive GIS program database. I also integrated our research into general, informational presentations on aspects of storm surge risk and protection for a January, 2013 exhibition in Shanghai, to explain the concepts behind our group’s project. In the future, I hope to continue to learn more about effective ways of predicting water flow during flooding, as well as finite-element analysis tools.