Meshing ocean domains for coastal engineering applications

As we continue to exploit and alter the coastal environment, the quantification of the potential impacts from planned coastal engineering projects, as well as the minimisation of any detrimental effects through design optimisation, are receiving increasing attention. Geophysical fluid dynamics simulations can provide valuable insight towards the mitigation and prevention of negative outcomes, and as such are routinely used for planning, operational and regulatory reasons. The ability to readily create high-quality computational meshes is critical to such modelling studies as it impacts on the accuracy, efficiency and reproducibility of the numerical results. To that end, most (coastal) ocean modelling packages offer tailored mesh generation utilities. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) offer an ideal framework within which to process data for use in the meshing of coastal regions. GIS have been designed specifically for the processing and analysis of geophysical data and are a popular tool in both the academic and industrial sectors. On the other hand Computer Aided Design (CAD) is the most appropriate tool for designing coastal structures and is usually the user interface to generic three–dimensional mesh generation frameworks. In this paper we combine GIS and CAD with a view towards mesh generation for an impact study of the proposed Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon project within the Bristol Channel and Severn Estuary. We demonstrate in this work that GIS and CAD can be used in a complementary way to deliver unstructured mesh generation capabilities for coastal engineering applications.