Lagrangian gauges for particle tracking

Specifying Lagrangian Gauges

Gauges are normally added in setrun.py via lines of the form:

rundata.gaugedata.gauges.append([gaugeno, xg, yg, t1, t2])

where (xg,yg) is the gauge location and the gauge is to be tracked for t1 <= t <= t2. Several properties can already be set for gauges, for example rundata.gaugedata.display_format can be used to specify how many digits to print out. This can be either a single format string or a dictionary with an entry for each gauge, as described at Gauges.

As of GeoClaw Version 5.7.0, a new property has been defined that specifies whether each gauge is “stationary” or “lagrangian”. In the past all gauges were stationary, i.e. (xg,yg) is a fixed location. If a gauge is set to be lagrangian then (xg,yg) specifies the initial location for t <= t1 but after this time the gauge location is updated using the fluid velocity at each time that the gauge values are recorded (until time t2 if this is less than the final time of the computation, but often it is set to a huge value like 1e9).

The frequency of updating is controlled by rundata.gaugedata.min_time_increment – if this is 0 (the default) then the gauge values are updated every time step.

Currently lagrangian gauges are implemented only in GeoClaw, for which the fluid velocity (ug,vg) at a gauge location (xg,yg) is computed from the momentum in the appropriate manner based on rundata.geo_data.coordinate_system. This could be implemented more generally in amrclaw in the same manner, but of course would only make sense when solving equations for velocities are part of the solution.

The velocities are used to move each gauge location from the current (xg, yg) to (xg + dt*ug, yg + dt*vg), i.e. Forward Euler is used to integrate \(dx/dt = u, dy/dt = v\).

The default if nothing is added to setrun.py is equivalent to setting

rundata.gaugedata.gtype = 'stationary'

so that all gauges are stationary. Alternatively this can be set to ‘lagrangian’ to make all gauges lagrangian, or rundata.gaugedata.gtype can be a dictionary with rundata.gaugedata.gtype[gaugeno] set to one of these values as desired for each gauge. These values are written out to gauges.data (as 1 for stationary, 2 for lagrangian), from which they are read into GeoClaw.

When a gauge is lagrangian, the values written out (e.g. to the file _output/gauge00001.txt for gauge 1) are modified so that the columns that normally contain momenta hu and hv are replaced by the current location xg and yg.

Visclaw tools for plotting

A new module clawpack.visclaw.particle_tools has been added to facilitate plotting particle locations and particle paths.

An alternative using fgout grids

One can also use the Fixed grid output capabilities added to GeoClaw in Version 5.9.0 in order to capture the solution over a specified fixed grid at frequent output times. If this output is frequent enough, then it is also possible to sample these outputs at a fixed location to give a time series similar to a gauge output, but with the advantage that the points need not be specified prior to the run (at least for any point that can be spatially interpolated from the fgout grid(s) captured in the run). The temporal resolution will be that specified for the fgout grids. See Fixed grid output for more details.