Effect of local refinement of unstructured grid on the tidal modeling in the south-western coast of Korea

Abstract

Lee, M.E., Kim, G. and Nguyen, V.T., 2013. Effect of local refinement of unstructured grid on the tidal modeling in the south-western coast of Korea.To deal with a very complicated bathymetry in the south-western coast of Korea (SWCK), in this paper a numerical calculation with respect to varying grid and bathymetric resolutions was carried out for M2 barotropic tidal motion using FVCOM. In order to improve the model accuracy, horizontal grid resolutions resolving irregular coastlines and bathymetry together with data accuracy are considered. To do this, three refined horizontal grid resolutions were constructed in the nested local area around SWCK. At each horizontal grid structure, two different bathymetry resolutions were applied; the higher resolution based on a latest survey (2007) is more accurate. Bathymetric data with higher resolution was reconstructed as two different samples of data, to test the effect of resolving basic bathymetric data and the improvement of data accuracy, separately. From the test results, it was found that the accuracy of modeled M2 tidal elevation in this region can be improved dominantly by increasing the accuracy of basic bathymetric data, instead of resolving coastline and islands or increasing the resolution of bathymetry.