open TELEMAC-MASCARET The mathematically superior suite of solvers

Hello!

I’m a marine geology graduate student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. I’m also affiliated with Canada’s Pacific Geoscience Centre (Geological Survey of Canada). I have virtually no prior experience with hydrodynamic modelling or programming/coding, but I’m skilled with GIS and spreadsheets (we all must start somewhere).

A research goal of mine is to relate the seabed geomorphology/surficial geology in my study area (a portion of the Washington State-British Columbia border in the Salish Sea) to the broad tidal current patterns there.

A physical oceanographer with the Canadian government (Department of Fisheries and Oceans) kindly provided me with near-seabed current outputs from his “in-house” finite element tidal model (the file formatting is discussed at the end of this post). The oceanographer added extra nodes to the tidal model in order to capture bathymetric complexities in my study area.

I only discovered the existence of Blue Kenue several days ago while surfing the web! As I reviewed the manuals (Blue Kenue and PSed) and this forum, I became very impressed with the data visualization and sediment transport modelling capabilities of the software. My possible objectives with Blue Kenue/PSed are:

1) create visualizations of near-seabed tidal current patterns (velocity roses, vector maps, flow paths and animations);

2) obtain data ranges/statistics that can be used to describe the tidal flow patterns within my study area;

and possibly,

3) use the PSed module to predict/map seabed sediment mobility, shear stress and particle transport pathways (I’ve already collected and analyzed numerous seabed sediment samples to accompany my multibeam bathymetry/backscatter and ROV seabed video transects).

Because I would eventually like to work with the time varying tidal velocity data in the PSed module, I suspect that I need to convert it into the 2D triangular mesh formats (*.t3s/*.t3v). I believe this would involve splitting up my data file to create the following new files: i) *.t3s bathymetry (non-time varying / with node connectivity information / binary or ASCII); ii) *.t3s depth (basically the same as the file in i, but without connectivity data / binary); and iii) *.t3v u- & v-velocities (time-varying / binary).

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to go about this. My time-varying near-seabed velocity data formatting is described below and I have also attached the original file. I would be extremely grateful if someone were to suggest a workflow that would allow me to get from this file to the file format(s) necessary to meet any/all the 3 objectives above. Also, please don’t be shy with any other advice!


Thank you in advance,
Sean Mullan...a clueless geologist



Tidal model output format

In the attached text document you can see that each hour contains the data at 3,432 nodes. You’ll also notice that the nodes in the file are numbered from 134-16,947 and that numbers are missing. This is because the file represents a geographic subset of a larger finite element model. There are 696 hours (29 days) of “post-spin up” model data (1-hour time steps).

The columns from left to right are: 1) node number; 2) longitude; 3) latitude; 4) bathymetric depth; 5) tidal elevation; 6) u-velocity; and 7) v-velocity. Obviously, only the data from columns 5-7 changes in each hourly block. The file text looks like this:

1.000000
134 -123.12817 48.67821 83.80000 -0.62879 -0.26495 0.48206
135 -123.11922 48.67965 89.90000 -0.62668 -0.26273 0.44821
136 -123.10956 48.68036 90.53000 -0.63226 -0.22256 0.58090
… [data for all the hours between 1 and 517]
517.0000
134 -123.12817 48.67821 83.80000 0.10459 -0.13913 0.00270
135 -123.11922 48.67965 89.90000 0.10333 -0.13796 -0.03460
136 -123.10956 48.68036 90.53000 0.10601 -0.15571 -0.02191
… [the file ends with the data at hour 696]
696.0000
134 -123.12817 48.67821 83.80000 -0.33324 -0.12199 0.29708
135 -123.11922 48.67965 89.90000 -0.33256 -0.19642 0.25552
136 -123.10956 48.68036 90.53000 -0.33433 -0.06853 0.40912
…

I'm not sure if my attachment worked, so I have tried again.

The tidal model output file in question ("mullan_zuv_timeseries_bot_r13_h145-840.dat") is readable with a text editor and can be downloaded from this Google Drive link:

drive.google.com/file/d/0B6EWmovNx2s2TEY...VDA/view?usp=sharing