Modeling tide and storm surge in the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia

Abstract

The primary focus of this thesis involves the numerical simulations of the hydrodynamic flows in the coastal areas of Terengganu, which is subjected to tides and the two seasonal monsoons. For this purpose, we developed two numerical simulation models named TIDE-2D and TUNA-SU, based upon modification and enhancement of existing in-house models TIDE and TUNA-M2 respectively. Both models are governed by the two-dimensional depth-integrated shallow water equations (SWE), which are widely used to simulate similar hydrodynamic regimes. These equations are solved by means of the explicit finite difference method with a staggered grid system, which are restricted in the time step by the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CLF) criterion to ensure numerical stability. The validation of TIDE-2D and TUNA-SU are performed by comparing the model simulation results with known analytical solutions and solutions derived from previously tested software AQUASEA. The tidal dynamics in the coastal areas of Terengganu is satisfactorily simulated by means of TIDE-2D. Similarly TUNA-SU performs satisfactorily to simulate interesting current patterns in South China Sea, which agree with observations during the northeast and southwest monsoons. Finally, two storm surge cases that occurred in Peninsular Malaysia's coastal areas are simulated by means of TUNA-SU. These two storm surges are induced by the Tropical Cyclone Vamei of 2001 and the Extreme Northeast Monsoons of 2004.