Rationale for Large Domain High Resolution Unstructured Grids to Simulate Coastal Hydrodynamic Processes

The hydrodynamics of the coastal ocean is dominated by wind, waves, tides and atmospheric pressure driven flows. These processes are coupled on scales from an entire deep ocean basin, to the shelf, and to the adjacent estuarine, floodplain, and riverine systems and are impacted by the process scales and by the imposed geographic scales. Examples applications are presented using the ADCIRC coastal circulation model coupled to the SWAN non-phase resolving wind wave model to illustrate the essential features of domain size and reach, resolution, and processes. Examples include tidal water levels and currents, hurricane driven water levels, currents and wave environments, wind and tide driven transport of oyster spat, and annual wind and pressure driven water level variability. A case is made that integration of models and scales improves accuracy and robustness but that automated h-p adaptation can be used to enable more efficient and faster computations. The large size of these computations, the heterogeneity of the coupled models, and the requirement for h-p adaptation suggests that new large scale computational paradigms such as HPX be explored and developed.