Dr. Rick Luettich

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Lead Principal Investigator for the Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence

Director, UNC Center for Natural Hazards Resilience

Alumni Distinguished Professor of Marine Sciences and Environmental Sciences and Engineering

Director, UNC Institute of Marine Sciences

Dr. Rick Luettich’s research addresses modeling and observational studies of circulation and transport in complex coastal systems. He is a principal developer of the ADCIRC circulation and storm surge model that is widely used by the academic, government and private sectors for coastal flood hazard assessments, mitigation design, event-based forensics and forecasting. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and led over $50 million dollars in extramurally funded research.

He is actively engaged in the coastal science and coastal resilience communities, serving as the lead PI of the Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence since 2008; the lead PI of the NOAA Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed from 2010-2018; a member of three recent National Academies study committees on coastal issues (chairing the 2013-14 committee on Coastal Risk Reduction); a member of the Water Institute of the Gulf’s Science and Engineering Advisory Council; and a member of the Board of Commissioners of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East from 2012-2019.

Dr. Luettich has an undergraduate and master’s degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech and a doctor of science in civil engineering from MIT.

Publications

Taylor G. Asher, RA Luettich, Jason G. Fleming, Brian O. Blanton. Low frequency water level correction in storm surge models using data assimilation. Ocean Modeling. 2019,144(3163):101483; DOI: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2019.101483.
Bilskie, M.V., Asher, T.G., Fleming, J.G., Hagen, S.C., Kaiser, C., Luettich Ur., R.A., Twilley, R. (2019) Real-time storm surge predictions during Hurricane Michael. Weather and Forecasting, In Progress (Previously submitted to Geophysical Research Letters and being revised).
Rick Luettich (ed.), “Coastal Hazards Related to Storm Surge,” Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 2018.
Influence of storm timing and forward speed on tides and storm surge during Hurricane Matthew. Authors: Ajimon Thomas, JC Dietrich, TG Asher, M Bell, BO Blanton, JH Copeland, AT Cox, CN Dawson, JG Fleming, RA Luettich. Ocean Modelling. DOI: 10.1016/j.ocemod.2019.03.004.

Conference Papers, Presentations, Theses

Storm Surge Probabilities for Hurricane Events, J. Smith, B. Blanton, R. Luettich, 2017. Poster presented at AMS 2017 in Seattle WA (Jan 2017), DHS CRC Annual Meeting in Chapel Hill, NC (Feb 2017), and the annual Hurricane Awareness conference at East Carolina University (May 2017).
Smith, J., Blanton. B., and Luettich, R. 2018. Probabilistic Hurricane Track Generation for Storm Surge Prediction. Presented at the American Meteorological Society 2018, Austin, TX.