Scaling Issues in Hydraulic Modelling

Introduction

The uncertainties involved in many coastal issues and the lack of complete scientific background in some knowledge fields, especially to evaluate extreme coastal-forcing events, the cumulative environmental evolution and impacts on beaches and coastal structures as well as to confirm design procedures, for instance, lead to the need of using physical modelling. There is also little public awareness of the physics behind several coastal processes and physical modelling can help in describing and illustrating them.

In this paper a brief revue on the importance of physical modelling, its advantages in relation to numerical modelling, some basic aspects of physical modelling, related scaling issues and how to control hydraulic modelling and scale effects as well as three case studies and future challenges will be presented.

References

The main author of this article is Taveira Pinto, Francisco With contributions by: Paulo Rosa-Santos, Luciana das Neves, Raquel Silva For other articles by this author see Category:Articles by Taveira Pinto, Francisco