brunota2003 wrote:http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/surge/
There is a good page regarding storm surge. Now has for your question, no the surge totals do not account for waves. So if you have a 17 ft surge and you are sitting ontop of your roof (assuming the building is even still standing), and an 8 ft wave comes along, it will wash over the peak of your roof, and very likely take you with it. This happened during Katrina, where you can watch the waves wash over the peaks of houses as the waves propagate through the areas (and thus, if anyone had escaped to the roof, they would have been washed away).
Ok, thanks. That's pretty much what I thought, but I wasn't sure. I would assume my "22 foot wave" is measured peak to valley, and therefor its peak would be approximately 11 ft. above average, with "average" being the level of the storm surge. So, in my example (assuming the building is still standing), I get washed away by a wave peaking 10 ft. over the roof level. (Granted that even a 2-3 ft. wave peak is probably enough to knock me off the roof.) This helps me to understand, even if it's in a contrived way, what the people affected are up against...
