NUMERICAL MODELLING OF EXTREME WAVES ON VARIOUS BED SLOPES

The understanding of coastal waves is vital in the design of coastal infrastructure and marine renewables. However, the complexity of interacting physical effects including nonlinear wave amplification, wave breaking, and the influence of bathymetry presents significant challenges in modelling waves in the coastal zone. This has catalysed the development of several numerical models that seek to replicate wave propagation observed in real seas by encapsulating these effects. The present study investigates the performance of Simulating WAves till SHore (SWASH), a non-hydrostatic model based on the solution of the nonlinear shallow water equations (Zijlema et al., 2011), at modelling random waves over a range of bathymetries. The accuracy of the numerical model at capturing the evolution of wave heights is evaluated by comparing numerical predictions to equivalent sea-states generated experimentally. The broad range of sea-states and bed slopes explored in this study establishes a wide scope for the findings of this work.