Chandi Witharana remembers the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka. Although its destruction did not directly affect his family, the event and the lack of warning and preparation for it made a huge impression on him.

So when he joined the University of Connecticut in 2006 as a geosciences graduate student in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, he decided to focus on storm surges. These are essentially tsunamis, although on the Atlantic coast, they are caused not by an earthquake or a volcano but by hurricanes. The surges can cause not only deaths, but also severe damage to buildings and their contents.

Although most people think about wind damage from hurricanes, it is actually storm surges that are most dangerous. “The greatest potential for loss of life and destruction of property is a storm surge, which is basically a tropical cyclone,” Witharana says.

He notes that the danger from storms is growing because of rapid urbanization along the coast, and global warming, which is causing more violent storms and rising sea levels.

Witharana, a former United Nations employee, believes that the more you know, the more you can prepare. Using Groton, Conn. as a test case, he developed a formula that predicts the damage to building contents in a storm surge.

His work uses Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing and Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to predict just how much damage a storm surge will cause.

“Improving the analysis and identification of storm surge damage risk is crucial for risk-reduction policy-making in coastal towns,” Witharana says. “My objective is to develop a method of quantifying flood-damage risk to the contents of vulnerable buildings.”

A category one hurricane in Connecticut would produce a storm surge of four to five feet, while a category four hurricane – which the state has never experienced — would cause a surge of more than 16 feet. The worst hurricane recorded in Connecticut was in 1938, when a category three hurricane caused massive loss of life and property. Storm surges are dependent not only on wind velocity but on the tides, with the most damage caused during high tide.

Although there are now better warning systems to evacuate people, if the 1938 hurricane occurred today, it would cause even more damage than it did at the time, because there has been so much development and building along the coast.

“Knowing the volatility of the storm minimizes the risk to lives, but not to infrastructure,” says Witharana. “There has been a lot of urbanization concentrated along the coast, and that makes the area much more vulnerable for future disasters.”

“Damage to building content increases with flood water depth inside the building,” he says. In Groton, which has a population of 40,000 in a dense area that includes industrial, educational, military, and residential buildings, Witharana was able to measure the depth of water that would enter buildings under various scenarios, and calculate the corresponding damage to a building’s content for a given flood depth.

The model does not offer dollar estimates for the damage. But it does estimate the percentage of damage to content for individual buildings in the study area, provide maps of where the damage would occur, and consider 27 different storm surge scenarios.

“Natural disasters are inevitable – basically you can not prevent them. But using the best technology, you can predict what might happen,” says Witharana, now a Ph.D. candidate. “Knowing the volatility of the situation might help you to minimize risk.”