Dr. David L George

US Geological Survey (USGS), USA.

A broad class of earth-surface flows are characterized by a shallow, free-surface, variable granular-fluid mixture flowing over erodible topography. It includes tsunamis, landslides, debris flows, erosive flows and transport. Together, these flows comprise the most significant set of natural hazards and a large fraction of the adverse geological impacts of climate change. In addition to their common association as geological hazards, as flows they share fundamental physical properties, yield mathematically related governing equations, and pose similar numerical challenges.

These problems often involve related hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations, for which I develop a class of finite volume methods and adaptive mesh refinement techniques, implemented in an open-source software framework known as Clawpack. I develop specialized subpackages within the Clawpack project known as GeoClaw (tsunamis, flooding, storm surges) and D-Claw for two-phase granular-fluid mixtures.

I will provide an overview to this type of flow modeling and highlight recent extensions of D-Claw to hybrid problems, including tsunamigenic landslides and landslide-generated lake outburst flood modeling for hazard studies.