Adaptive mesh refinement method. Part 2: Application to tsunamis propagation

Numerical simulations of multi dimensional large scale fluid-flows such as tsunamis, are still nowadays a challenging and a difficult problem. To this purpose, a parallel finite volume scheme on adaptive unstructured meshes for multi dimensional Saint-Venant system is presented. The adaptive mesh refinement method is based on a block-based decomposition (called BB-AMR) which allows quick meshing and easy parallelization. The main difficulty addressed here concerns the selection of the mesh refinement threshold which is certainly the most important parameter in the AMR method. Usually, the threshold is calibrated according to the test problem to balance the accuracy of the solution and the computational cost. To avoid " hand calibration " , we apply an automatic threshold method based on the decreasing rearrangement function of the mesh refinement criterion. This method is applied and validated successfully to the one and two dimensional non homogeneous Saint-Venant system through several tsunamis propagation test cases