This study presents a numerical landslide-tsunami hazard assessment technique for applications in reservoirs, lakes, fjords, and the sea. This technique is illustrated with hypothetical scenarios at Es Vedrà, offshore Ibiza, although currently no evidence suggests that this island may become unstable. The two selected scenarios include two particularly vulnerable locations, namely: (i) Cala d’Hort on Ibiza (3 km away from Es Vedrà) and (ii) Marina de Formentera (23 km away from Es Vedrà). The violent wave generation process is modelled with the meshless Lagrangian method smoothed particle hydrodynamics. Further offshore, the simulations are continued with the less computational expensive code SWASH (Simulating WAves till SHore), which is based on the non-hydrostatic non-linear shallow water equations that are capable of considering bottom friction and frequency dispersion. The up to 133-m high tsunamis decay relatively fast with distance from Es Vedrà; the wave height 5 m offshore Cala d’Hort is 14.2 m, reaching a maximum run-up height of over 21.5 m, whilst the offshore wave height (2.7 m) and maximum inundation depth at Marina de Formentera (1.2 m) are significantly smaller. This study illustrates that landslide-tsunami hazard assessment can nowadays readily be conducted under consideration of site-specific details such as the bathymetry and topography, and intends to support future investigations of real landslide-tsunami cases.
1 January 2020 in Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
This paper analyzes the modeling of the hydro- and morphodynamics of bichromatic wave groups on an intermediate beach with an initial slope. The nonhydrostatic version of XBeach was used to simulate two incident wave conditions of the experiments carried out within the HYDRALAB-IV Coupled High Frequency Measurement of Swash Sediment Transport and Morphodynamic (CoSSedM) project. The chosen forcing conditions have different strengths of swash–swash interaction. A procedure was developed to generate boundary conditions for the model that are able to fully account for both the bound and free long waves measured during the experiments. Using the normalized root-mean-squared error as a measure, this paper finds a higher accuracy of the nonhydrostatic version of XBeach in simulating swash–swash interaction from the hydrodynamics point of view, and worse performances in capturing the details of intragroup sediment transport. Nevertheless, the model is able to distinguish the relative difference in offshore swash sediment transport among different types of swash–swash interaction, and it is overall more successful in simulating beach morphodynamics when the swash sediment transport is of the same order of magnitude as the surf zone one.
Floods can transport debris of a very wide range of dimensions, from cohesive sediments to large floating debris, such as trees and cars. The latter increases the risk associated with floods by, for example, obstructing the flow or damaging structures due to impact. The transport of this type of debris and their interaction with structures are often studied experimentally in the context of tsunamis and flash floods. Numerical studies on this problem are rare, therefore the present study focuses on the numerical modelling of the flow-debris interaction. This is achieved by simulating multiple laboratory experiments, available in the literature, of a single buoyant container transported by a dam-break flow in order to validate the chosen numerical approach. The numerical simulations are carried using the open source DualSPHysics model based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method coupled with the multi-physics engine CHRONO, which handles the container–bottom interactions. The trajectory, as well as the velocity of the centroid of the container, were tracked throughout the simulation and compared with the same quantities measured in the laboratory. The agreement between the model and the experiment results is quantitatively assessed using the normalised root mean squared error and it is shown that the model is accurate in reproducing the floating container trajectory and velocity.