GeoClaw Description and Detailed Contents

See www.geoclaw.org for more overview of the GeoClaw software and links to references and uses.

Warning

As with all of Clawpack, this code is provided as a research and teaching tool with no guarantee of suitability for any particular purpose, and no liability on the part of the authors. See the License for more details and Cautionary Hints on using GeoClaw for tips on exercising appropriate care in using the code.

The $CLAW/geoclaw directory contains a specialized version of some Clawpack and AMRClaw routines that have been modified to work well for certain geophysical flow problems.

Currently the focus is on 2d depth-averaged shallow water equations for flow over varying topography. The term bathymetry is often used for underwater topography (sea floor or lake bottom), but in this documentation and in the code the term topography is often used to refer to either.

A primary concern with such flows is handling the margins of the flow where the depth goes to 0, for example at the shore line. In GeoClaw this is handled by letting the depth variable h in the shallow water equations be 0 in some cells. Robust Riemann solvers are used that allow for dry cells adjacent to wet cells and that allow wetting and drying, for example as a tsunami inundates dry land.

Some sample calculations can be viewed in the gallery_geoclaw. More will eventually appear in the Clawpack Applications repository.

  • Links to relevant papers and sample codes (some are based on the Clawpack 4.x version of GeoClaw).