Simulating the aftermath of Northern European Enclosure Dam (NEED) break and flooding of European coast

The Northern European Enclosure Dam (NEED) is a hypothetical project to prevent flooding in European countries following the rising ocean level due to melting arctic glaciers. This project involves the construction of two large dams between Scotland and Norway, as well as England and France. The ant...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Maczuga, Pawel, Łoś, Marcin, Valseth, Eirik, Serra, Albert Oliver, Siwik, Leszek, Alberdi Celaya, Elisabete, Paszyńska, Anna, Paszyński, Maciej
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universidad del País Vasco
Repositorio:Addi. Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación
OAI Identifier:oai:addi.ehu.eus:10810/77532
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10810/77532
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:modeling
dam break
wave eqautions
Descripción
Sumario:The Northern European Enclosure Dam (NEED) is a hypothetical project to prevent flooding in European countries following the rising ocean level due to melting arctic glaciers. This project involves the construction of two large dams between Scotland and Norway, as well as England and France. The anticipated cost of this project is 250 to 500 billion euros. In this paper, we present the simulation of the aftermath of flooding on the European coastline caused by a catastrophic break of this hypothetical dam. From our simulation results, we can observe a traveling wave after the accident, with a velocity of approximately 45 kms per hour, raising the sea level permanently inside the dammed region. This observation implies a need to construct additional dams or barriers protecting the Netherlands’ northern coastline and the Baltic Sea’s interior. Our simulations have been obtained using the following building blocks. First, a graph transformation model was applied to generate an adaptive mesh, refined towards the seabed and the seashore topography, approximating the topography of the Earth. We employ the composition graph grammar model to break the mesh’s triangular elements without generating hanging nodes. Second, the wave equation is formulated in a spherical latitude-longitude system of coordinates and solved by a high-order time integration scheme using the generalized method. While our paper mainly focuses on the simulation of the NEED dam break, we also provide a stand-alone tool to generate an adaptive mesh of the whole Earth. We can use our software as a stand-alone package in FEniCS or other simulation software.