Formulation and application of the adaptive hydraulics three-dimensional shallow water and transport models

Abstract

Next generation, conservative finite element hydrodynamic and transport models are vital for accurate and efficient ocean, estuary and river simulation. Numerical models such as these have been developed for decades by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at the Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC). This paper focuses on recently developed implicit, multi-dimensional finite element 3D shallow water and transport models included in the Adaptive Hydraulics (AdH) numerical suite. These AdH 3D models benefit from their adaptive meshing capabilities to resolve sharp solution gradients, such as those often encountered with baroclinic wedges traveling up an estuary channel. This paper presents the AdH 3D mathematical formulation and solution procedure used to solve the weak finite element equations for these models, along with results for several common verification cases and an AdH Galveston Bay validation study. A novel Streamline Upwind Petrov–Galerkin (SUPG) method for 3D shallow water models is described which reduces to the AdH 2D shallow water SUPG formulation under certain conditions. Careful attention is placed on ensuring discrete consistency in the equation set.