In September of 2008, Hurricane Ike swept across the Gulf of Mexico and hit the coast of Galveston, Texas causing high storm surges that led to billions of dollars in damage and killed hundreds of people. Predicting storm surges is difficult, due to limits in computational ability and forecasting errors, which hinders emergency evacuations and preparation. Simulations of Hurricane Ike were used to better understand the usefulness of different methods of constructing and imposing the storm in the surge model environment in an attempt to explore the resulting surge and to increase predictive abilities. The ADvanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC) model was forced with two different representations of the storm, both originating from forecast data generated with the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF). The comparison was made between the storm surge simulations forced with the full WRF wind and pressure fields, and a simplified storm approximation constructed from the WRF data, partly developed in this work. The simplified approach used for forcing, developed here, was obtained by measuring the nautical distance from the center of the hurricane, at 6 hour intervals, for the maximum extent of the 34-, 50-, 64-knot, and strongest winds. Differences were found among the resulting storm surges, most noticeably in the points of inundation near where the storm made landfall. Given further investigation, the simplified storm model may produce results more consistent with WRF, but currently the complicated WRF model is a better tool for determining where evacuation and emergency preparation efforts should be focused.