Description
The oceans effect many things on Earth. From weather and food supplies to shipping routes, the oceans impact everyone, which makes the numerical modeling of ocean phenomenon incredibly important. With as many different impacts the ocean has on the Earth, there are just as many models describing its behavior. Deep water modeling shows the interactions of currents, temperature, and salinity and how this propagates on a global scale. Shallow water models describe near shore phenomenon like waves impacting jetties and sand movement on a beach. Since there are such different physical parameters in each problem,and with many different techniques available, no one ocean model can do everything in a computationally efficient way. Deep water models, optimized for large scale features, are not able to capture surface conditions or violent interactions accurately. Shallow water models, optimized for smaller distances, lack the sophistication to render global slow phenomenon impacted by temperature, pressure, and salinity. To overcome these drawbacks, coupling is used to combine the best features of different models to better resolve complex interactions between large and small scale phenomenon. Presented here is a coupling between GCCOM and SWASH using the Distributed Coupling Toolkit (DCT) to resolve free surface conditions for a lock release experiment. This coupled system is able to resolve free surface conditions from a non-hydrostatic experiment over a large vertical scale, something neither model can do efficiently alone. The coupled system is validated modeling the flow of long period waves over a seamount.
