Previous Work

Previous work on the Shallow Water serial code consisted of its application to the Río de la Plata in Guarga et al. (1992) and Kaplan et al. (1992). The main contribution at this stage was the development of the low-reflecting open boundary condition. This kind of boundary condition allows the simulation of an infinite length channel and hence the development of the analytical solution performed in Section 6.

That BC has been applied to the East oceanic open boundary, figure 8.2 on the Río de la Plata simulation. This development was necessary due to the physical configuration of the Río de la Plata where the main forcing surge components came into the computational domain from the South (Cartwright et al., 1991; Ray, 1993; Schwiderski, 1983).

Later on, the Parallel Shallow-Water (PTidal) code was introduced in Kaplan (1997) employing the domain decomposition. This development arises from the requirement to employ a denser grid mesh to allow an accurate application of the results to environmental models. This refinement increased the number of cells, and hence, the computational load, by a factor of 25 when switching from a 5 km grid cell mesh to 1 km cell size. Numerical models to be used as prediction tools for environmental risk assessment require also fast results to allow a quick response. An example is the application of the model to predict the behavior of oil spills.

Extensive measurement of the code response in time employing several kinds of parallel machines has been presented in (Kaplan, 1998b).