A THREE-DIMENSIONAL NON-HYDROSTATIC NUMERICAL MODEL FOR PREDICTION OF OCEAN CURRENTS

Modeling of flow and transport in oceanic water bodies is of great importance for hydraulic and coastal engineering, environmental protection, and disaster planning. A number of numerical models based on the hydrostatic assumption and the depth integrated shallow water equations have been developed. Although these assumptions are usually employed to reduce the complexity and computational burden of full pressure– velocity coupling problems of the 3D free-surface hydrodynamic models, they are no longer valid for flows over abruptly-changing bed topographies, flows with sharp density gradients or current-wave interactions, for which the ratio of the vertical to horizontal scale of motion is not small. In this paper a three-dimensional free surface numerical model is developed to simulate the oceanic and coastal hydrodynamics based on the fully threedimensional Navier-Stokes equations.