Upcoming Event Scientific Talk - Coupled Shallow Surface and Subsurface Flow

Prof. Dr. Peter Bastian is on visit to India. During his visit he will engage in scientific discussions with PIs from Indian Institute of Science and National Centre for Biological Sciences. On November 24th Prof. Bastian will deliver the Scientific Talk titled, "Coupled Shallow Surface and Subsurface Flow". His visit is coordinated by Heidelberg Centre South Asia and the talk has been organised in cooperation with The German Consulate Bangalore and Indian Institute of Science.

Simulation of coupled surface and subsurface flow is important for understanding water budget on a variety of scales. The talk will review common models for surface and subsurface flow and then settle on a model that couples the diffusive wave approximation of the shallow water equations with shallow groundwater flow in the uppermost, unconfined aquifer. The model is discretized with a cell-centered finite volume scheme and solved with a fully-coupled Newton-multigrid method. Transport of dissolved substances is discretized with a higher-order discontinuous Galerkin scheme. It is demonstrated that large-scale simulations are possible through parallel computation on widely available multicore servers. However, with great compute capabilities comes the need for estimating model parameters from available data, a difficulty which is only be hinted at.