Three-dimensional shallow-water flow

Abstract

Most of this book is about 2-d shallow-water flows, obtained either by integrating over depth or by splitting into vertical modes. This approach works remarkably well in many cases, even when you would expect significant 3-d effects, such as in wind-driven flows. However, there are many other cases where the 2-d model is not good enough but where the shallow-water approximation can still be made. In such cases, you will have to solve the 3-d SWE (or, what amounts to the same thing, boundary-layer equations). Some of the reasons may be the following.