Presenter: Marie-Pierre Delisle (University of California, Los Angeles)

Description:
Coastal flooding is a growing socioeconomic and humanitarian hazard. Sea level rise will raise beach groundwater levels, potentially inundating low-lying areas from groundwater exposure while simultaneously propagating swash impacts onto higher beach and backshore elevations. Generally, coastal flood modeling efforts have relied on the nonlinear shallow water equations and characterize only surface flows, neglecting swash zone processes such as infiltration and porous media flow. Swash zone processes are multi-phase, shallow, and transient presenting numerous modeling and observational challenges. In this study, the free-surface resolving Reynolds-averaged Eulerian two-phase sediment transport model, SedWaveFoam, is integrated with the surface wave solver, olaFlow, in the OpenFOAM framework and validated using canonical laboratory flume observations. Results show that the modeled free surface elevation and velocity agree well with measured data. Preliminary modeling suggests that antecedent groundwater levels substantially impact uprush excursion extent and duration.