A well-balanced meshless tsunami propagation and inundation model

SCAIM Seminar
January 25, 2018 7:00 pm

Speaker:  Alexander Bihlo, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Memorial University of Newfoundland

URL for Speaker:  http://www.mun.ca/math/people/ppl-faculty/bihlo.php

Location:  ESB 4133

Intended Audience:  Public

We derive a universal criterion for the preservation of the lake at rest solution in general mesh-based and meshless numerical schemes for the shallow-water equations with bottom topography. The main idea is a careful mimetic design for the spatial derivative operators in the momentum flux equation that is paired with a compatible averaging rule for the water column height arising in the bottom topography source term. The resulting numerical schemes for the shallow-water equations are called well-balanced. Based on a well-balanced RBF-FD discretization of the shallow-water equations, we develop a meshless tsunami propagation and inundation model. The moving wet-dry interface between the incoming wave and the shoreline is handled using RBF generated extrapolation, yielding a truly meshless tsunami model. Several numerical results are presented that demonstrate excellent agreement of the resulting model with standard one- and two-dimensional benchmark tests. This is joint work with Rüdiger Brecht, Scott MacLachlan and Jörn Behrens.