Development of a third generation shallow-water wave model with unstructured spatial meshing

A numerical third-generation wave model dedicated both to deep water and near-shore applications is presented and applied to several test-cases to highlight its capabilities. Among its main features, this model uses a finite-elements technique for the discretization of the modelled area, which makes it suitable to represent complex bottom topographies and irregular shorelines. Furthermore, the piece-wise ray method used for wave propagation allows to use rather large time-steps, which in turn allows to keep the computational time at a very moderate level. The implementation of shallow-water physics in the model is also described, in particular with respect to depth-induced breaking. Several applications of the model are presented and compared to field or laboratory data for their validation. Finally, the main research and development items are mentioned and discussed.