Finite Element-Based Coastal Ocean Modeling: Today and Tomorrow
Abstract
The continued necessity of military special forces operations in riverine and coastal environments along with increasing civilian concerns related to sediment transport, search and rescue, pollutant dispersal, and coastal restoration, have resulted in the need for detailed knowledge of currents and water levels in coastal, estuarine, and riverine environments. This demand for information at highly resolved spatial and temporal scales and the availability of massively parallel computer resources has brought to the forefront the capabilities of finite element (FE)-based coastal ocean circulation models. The use by these models of unstructured triangular meshes permits a large degree of flexibility in representing the complexities of coastal environments associated with convoluted shorelines, and steep gradients in currents or bathymetry. Ultimately this flexibility results in model predictions over periods of hours or less at spatial scales that range from meters to kilometers. Unstructured meshes containing upwards of 281,800 computational points and 540,000 triangular elements are constructed to represent riverine and coastal currents off the shores of southeast Louisiana and Mississippi (Fig. 1). Spatial resolution is 50 m in rivers and decreases to 100 to 200 m offshore. The need for remote boundary forcing is accommodated by including the Gulf of Mexico and extending the mesh into the north Atlanta ocean. The applied forcing includes tides, wind stress at the water surface and river discharge from the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA480239
Entities
People
- C. A. Blain
- R. A. Arnone
- R. W. Gould
- T. C. Massey
Organizations
- United States Naval Research Laboratory