Dorado: A Python package for simulating passive particle transport in shallow-water flows

Jayaram Hariharan,Paola Passalacqua,Kyle Wright

doi:10.21105/joss.02585

Abstract

dorado: A Python package for simulating passive particle transport in shallow-water flows

Highlights

Hydrodynamic simulations of flow through landscapes allow scientists to answer questions related to the transport of water, nutrients, pollutants, biota, and sediment through waterways (Czuba, David, Edmonds, & Ward, 2019; Duan & Nanda, 2006; Lauzon & Murray, 2018; Rynne, Reniers, Kreeke, & MacMahan, 2016; Wild-Allen & Andrewartha, 2016). In geophysical systems, such as rivers, estuaries, and deltas, hydrodynamic models typically solve the depth-integrated “shallow water” equations in an Eulerian reference frame, which is concerned with fluxes through a given region of space – examples of these solvers include ANUGA (“ANUGA,” 2019), Delft3D (“Delft3D,” 2020), Frehd (Hodges, 2014) and others
The spatial and temporal characteristics of the movement of material through a landscape are often better understood using a Lagrangian reference frame (Doyle & Ensign, 2009), which follows the movement of individual objects or parcels
We present an open-source Python package, dorado, which provides a transparent and accessible method for researchers to simulate passive Lagrangian particle transport on top of Eulerian hydrodynamic solutions

Summary

Introduction

Hydrodynamic simulations of flow through landscapes allow scientists to answer questions related to the transport of water, nutrients, pollutants, biota, and sediment through waterways (Czuba, David, Edmonds, & Ward, 2019; Duan & Nanda, 2006; Lauzon & Murray, 2018; Rynne, Reniers, Kreeke, & MacMahan, 2016; Wild-Allen & Andrewartha, 2016). We present an open-source Python package, dorado, which provides a transparent and accessible method for researchers to simulate passive Lagrangian particle transport on top of Eulerian hydrodynamic solutions. This mixed Eulerian-Lagrangian methodology adapts the routing functionality from the popular numerical model DeltaRCM (Liang et al, 2015a, 2015b) for use with the outputs of any shallow-water hydrodynamic solver.

Results

Conclusion