Performance Comparison of NAMI DANCE and FLOW-3D® Models in Tsunami Propagation, Inundation and Currents using NTHMP Benchmark Problems

Field observations provide valuable data regarding nearshore tsunami impact, yet only in inundation areas where tsunami waves have already flooded. Therefore, tsunami modeling is essential to understand tsunami behavior and prepare for tsunami inundation. It is necessary that all numerical models used in tsunami emergency planning be subject to benchmark tests for validation and verification. This study focuses on two numerical codes, NAMI DANCE and FLOW-3D®, for validation and performance comparison. NAMI DANCE is an in-house tsunami numerical model developed by the Ocean Engineering Research Center of Middle East Technical University, Turkey and Laboratory of Special Research Bureau for Automation of Marine Research, Russia. FLOW-3D® is a general purpose computational fluid dynamics software, which was developed by scientists who pioneered in the design of the Volume-of-Fluid technique. The codes are validated and their performances are compared via analytical, experimental and field benchmark problems, which are documented in the ‘‘Proceedings and Results of the 2011 National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program (NTHMP) Model Benchmarking Workshop’’ and the ‘‘Proceedings and Results of the NTHMP 2015 Tsunami Current Modeling Workshop”. The variations between the numerical solutions of these two models are evaluated through statistical error analysis.