Search

The behavior of the Chezy frictional term near the shoreline has been studied in detail. An asymptotic analysis valid for water depths going to zero clearly shows that the use of such a term implies a non-receding motion of the shoreline. This phenomenon is induced by a thin layer of water which, because of frictional forces, remains on the beach and keeps it wet seaward of the largest run-up. However, the influence of such a frictional layer of water on the global wave motion is very weak and practically negligible for most of the swash zone flow dynamics. The existence of a non-receding shoreline has led to some clarifications on the role of some ad-hoc tools used in numerical models for the prediction of the wet/dry interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate, within the framework of the nonlinear shallow water equations (NSWE), the generation and evolution of large-scale eddies with vertical axis (macrovortices hereinafter) which are responsible for much of the horizontal mixing occurring at the boundaries between the main channel and the flood planes of a compound channel. We show that the mechanism of generation of vorticity is essentially inviscid and is analogous to that occurring at a curved shock. Numerical experiments performed by means of a recently developed shock-capturing model for the solution of the NSWE, and described in Brocchini et al. (2001), clarify some features of macrovortices generation and allow us to quantify the momentum transfer across the channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]