Development of efficient hydrodynamic and morphodynamic simulators for risk assessment and forecasting

PI: Manuel J. Castro Díaz
co-PI: Carlos Parés Madroñal

Acronym: SIMUNRISK

Abstract: The main goal of this project is the development of numerical models in the field of hydro and morpho-dynamics which are useful tools for the assessment and forecasting of risks related to natural or man-made disasters. These simulators will increase the power and versatility of the HySEA software, which is already being used by several organizations in the field of tsunami early warning systems. From the point of view of modeling, new models for simulating flooding; generation and propagation of tsunamis; landslides; erosion, transport and deposition of sediments; and storm surges will be obtained. The foreseen contributions focus on the inclusion of dispersive and non-hydrostatic effects; the improvement of the vertical velocity profiles using multilayer models; and the addition of new terms that adequately model the erosion, deposition, dilatation, and compaction effects on sediments, debris flows, and avalanches. From the point of view of the numerical analysis, we focus on the development of new numerical methods for these models and their analysis in the context of the entropy-measure valued solutions. New numerical methods for non-hyperbolic systems will be designed in order to reduce or to solve the difficulty of the convergence to the right weak solutions, as well as new methods that efficiently solve PDE systems with degenerate diffusion and / or discontinuous coefficients. HPC techniques, adaptive meshing and reduction of order methods will be used to implement the algorithms in an efficient way. Finally, uncertainty quantification and data assimilation techniques will be applied to improve the reliability of the results. The resulting numerical models will be the object of technological transfer and interdisciplinary scientific collaboration. On the other hand, the improvement or development of new models, numerical methods, and their efficient implementation will be not only a scientific breakthrough in the context of the project, but may be useful too for researchers working in related areas. In particular, in this project we also consider some applications to relativistic and ideal magnetohydrodynamic, that will probably give rise to new interdisciplinary scientific collaborations.