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Assessing Tsunami Vulnerabilities of Geographies with Shallow Water EquationsTsunami preparedness is crucial for saving human lives in case of disasters that involve massive water movement. In this work, we develop a framework for visual assessment of tsunami preparedness of geographies. Shallow water equations (also called Saint Venant equations) are a set of hyperbolic partial differential equations that are derived by depth-integrating the Navier-Stokes equations and provide a great abstraction of water masses that have lower depths compared to their free surface area. Our specific contribution in this study is to use Microsoft's XNA Game Studio to import underwater and shore line geographies, create different tsunami scenarios, and visualize the propagation of the waves and their impact on the shore line geography. Most importantly, we utilized the computational power of graphical processing units (GPUs) as HLSL based shader files and delegated all of the heavy computations to the GPU. Finally, we also conducted a validation study, in which we have tested our model against a controlled shallow water experiment. We believe that such a framework with an easy to use interface that is based on readily available software libraries, which are widely available and easily distributable, would encourage not only researchers, but also educators to showcase ideas.
Document ID
20130008672
Acquisition Source
Langley Research Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Aras, Rifat
(Old Dominion Univ. VA, United States)
Shen, Yuzhong
(Old Dominion Univ. VA, United States)
Date Acquired
August 27, 2013
Publication Date
March 1, 2012
Publication Information
Publication: Selected Papers Presented at MODSIM World 2011 Conference and Expo
Subject Category
Systems Analysis And Operations Research
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Public Use Permitted.
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