Modeling the coastal ocean over a time period of several weeks (Q846965)

This work is part of a program designed to study the drift of things like containers, lost object or oil spills over a long period of time in near coastal areas. The models describing this program are all based on the shallow water theory on variable ocean bottom at the continental shelf. The field equations to determine the water velocity and the elevation of the free surface are assumed to be dependent on the wind velocity, the tides, the viscosity of the water, frictions at the ocean bottom and the air-water interface. Hence they are rather complicated nonlinear hyperbolic equations involving small parameters reflecting interactions of several geophysical phenomena and the geometrical size of the coastal domain. The basic parameter is the ratio of the tide duration to the observation time. This parameter is of the order of 1/200 corresponding to 13 hours of tide duration and at least three months of observations. Various simplified models are then deduced by appropriate scale analyses. Existence of small parameters makes it possible to apply the powerful method of asymptotic analysis employing well-known techniques of singular perturbations. It is then shown by using methods of functional analysis that a classical solution can be found as a sequence converging weak* to a function.