OpenFOAM-avalanche 2312: Depth-integrated Models Beyond Dense Flow Avalanches

Rauter, Matthias; Kowalski, Julia

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210

Preprints

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210

Preprints

13 Feb 2024

| 13 Feb 2024

OpenFOAM-avalanche 2312: Depth-integrated Models Beyond Dense Flow Avalanches

Matthias Rauter and Julia Kowalski

Abstract. Numerical simulations have become an important tool for the estimation and mitigation of gravitational mass flows, such as avalanches, landslides, pyroclastic flows or turbidity currents. Depth-integration stands as a pivotal concept in rendering numerical models applicable to real-world scenarios, as it provides the required efficiency and a streamlined workflow for geographic information systems. In recent years, a large number of flow models were developed following the idea of depth-integration, thereby enlarging the applicability and reliability of this family of process models substantially. It has been previously shown that the Finite Area Method of OpenFOAM^® can be utilized to express and solve the basic depth-integrated models representing incompressible dense flows. In this manuscript, the previous work (Rauter et al., 2018) is extended beyond the dense flow regime to account for suspended particle flows, such as turbidity currents and powder snow avalanches. A novel coupling mechanism is introduced to enhance the simulation capabilities for mixed snow avalanches. Further, we will give an updated description of the revised computational framework, its integration into OpenFOAM and interfaces to geographic information systems. This work aims to provide practitioners and scientists with an open source tool that facilitates transparency and reproducibility and that can be easily applied to real world scenarios. The tool can be used as a baseline for further developments and in particular allows for modular integration of customized process models.

Received: 24 Jan 2024 – Discussion started: 13 Feb 2024

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Journal article(s) based on this preprint

02 Sep 2024

OpenFOAM-avalanche 2312: depth-integrated models beyond dense-flow avalanches

Matthias Rauter and Julia Kowalski

Geosci. Model Dev., 17, 6545–6569, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-6545-2024,https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-6545-2024, 2024

Short summary

Matthias Rauter and Julia Kowalski

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-210', Anonymous Referee #1, 25 Mar 2024

The manuscript presents a numerical coupling method to simulate dense flow avalanches using OpenFOAM. The work is very interesting and relevant and represents a substantial contribution to modelling science within the scope of Geoscientific Model Development. The methods and results are discussed properly. It would be interesting to know more about the reason for choosing this method and what would be alternatives (not existing). At the current state, the method is more appropriate for researchers than for practitioners as mentioned in the introduction, because of its sensitivity. Hence, more details on the possible opportunities and further developments would be relevant. Showing clearly and in more detail the possible extentions and how they could improve the results would be useful.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-RC1
- AC3: 'Reply on RC1', Matthias Rauter, 11 May 2024
  
  Dear referee,
  thank you very much for your review.
  Referee 2 send us some additional references that we will add to the manuscript as alternatives. Further we will tone down the applicability for practitioners, as referee 2 suggested as well. We will also try to discuss further developments clearer in the final manuscript.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-AC3
CEC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-210', Juan Antonio Añel, 27 Mar 2024

Dear authors,
Unfortunately, after checking your manuscript, it has come to our attention that it does not comply with our "Code and Data Policy".

https://www.geoscientific-model-development.net/policies/code_and_data_policy.html

You have archived your code on a repository not suitable for scientific publication. You must use other alternatives for long-term archival and publishing, such as Zenodo. Therefore, please, publish your code in one of the appropriate repositories, and reply to this comment with the relevant information (link and DOI) as soon as possible, as it should be available before the Discussions stage. Also, please, include in the repository the relevant primary input/output data for your experiments.
In this way, if you do not fix this problem, we will have to reject your manuscript for publication in our journal. I should note that, actually, your manuscript should not have been accepted in Discussions, given this lack of compliance with our policy. Therefore, the current situation with your manuscript is irregular.
Juan A. Añel

Geosci. Model Dev. Executive Editor

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-CEC1
- AC1: 'Reply on CEC1', Matthias Rauter, 31 Mar 2024
  
  Dear Executive Editor,
  
  thank you very much for putting our attention on this issue. Since this module is part of a larger model/framework, we included our code in the supplementary materials.
  We now also uploaded our code to Zenodo.org (https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10900454) and will update the respective part in the revised manuscript.
  
  Best regards,
  
  Matthias Rauter
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-210', Dieter Issler, 23 Apr 2024

The attached ZIP file contains the files
ref_rep_egusphere-2024-210.pdf – Reviewer's report
egusphere-2024-210.commDI.pdf – Manuscript with reviewer's annotations
If the revised manuscript were to be sent to me for review, I would very much appreciate if the authors did not reply to each of my annotations in their manuscript—just to the ones they did not implement! The journal may officially request this, but it simply does not make sense in this case.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-RC2
- EC1: 'Reply on RC2', Thomas Poulet, 24 Apr 2024
  
  Dear reviewer,
  Thank you very much for the detailed comments provided for this manuscript. I can see the annotated manuscript attached to your post (with the notes appearing when the document is downloaded and opened with Acrobat), but unfortunately not the overall report. Could you please attach that document again (ref_rep_egusphere-2024-210.pdf) as a reply to this post?
  
  Best regards,
  Thomas Poulet
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-EC1
- EC2: 'Reply on RC2: missing document attached', Thomas Poulet, 25 Apr 2024
  
  Here is the missing document (reviewer's report), posted this way for technical reasons since the discussion is now closed.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-EC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Matthias Rauter, 11 May 2024
  
  Dear Dieter,
  Thank you very much for reviewing the manuscript. We highly appreciate your opinion.
  Curvature effects:
  We mostly agree with your analysis, especially the misconception with Eq. (9). Luckily the code is not affected by this issue because it avoids expressing the curvature completely (that was the main selling point of Rauter and Tukvoic, 2018).
  We tried to connect the curvature-free approach with methods that explicitly considering curvature effects, but made some mistakes along the way. We will correct or remove the respective sections in the revised manuscript.
  We cannot follow the argument "This implies that [...] the surface derivative of scalar functions are of order (∆x)^2 and vanish in the limit ∆x -> 0" and don't think this is the case as the same argument could be made for any function.
  Curvature effects beside det J != 1 are considered in the model. The velocity vectors are constrained to the tangent plane by the basal pressure (see Rauter and Tukovic, 2018). We checked the direction of the velocity vectors as a test for the correctness for the basal pressure (among other tests). The velocity was surface tangential at all points in space and time except for small numerical errors, both in the simple quasi-1D case and the more complexly curved cases (see Rauter and Tukovic, 2018). We interpreted this as prove that the basal pressure including centrifugal forces is correct. If there is an error in the basal pressure it has a big impact on results, see e.g., this bug, where a projections was wrong: https://develop.openfoam.com/Development/openfoam/-/issues/2979. We think this misunderstanding can be attributed to the mistake we made in Eq. (9) and the second problem you found.
  Regarding the second problem you mention we fully agree with you. The main point we wanted to make is that the surface derivative can be split into a normal component (curvature effects) and tangential component. We first considered kappa as a placeholder which we didn't further specify, but wrongly connected it to Dieter-Kissling et al. (2015) at a later point. Of course it has to be a tensorial value and not the mean curvature. We will change this section.
  References:
  The work of Eglit, Grigorian, Yakimov and others is unfortunately not easily accessible and I usually end up in dead ends or being forwarded to Russian references (compare, e.g., references in Eglit et al., Geosciences, 2020). Conference papers are rarely available and complete in their description. Their influence on my work is very limited and I think that they are usually not the best references to send readers to. Foremost I miss applications, examples and simulations in the few publications that are available to me, something the other references provide. I also didn't study their work in detail and therefore feel not very comfortable citing it. So citing them is not without issues either. Anyway, we will add the review paper Eglit et al. (Geosciences, 2020) as a reference to developments in the Russian community.
  We were not aware of their two-layer model, except for the theoretical ideas I read in Eglit et al. (2020). At the point of writing we would have been very happy for some more input, especially on the coupling models. We will cite the Eglit (1998) and Issler (1998) papers as examples for a two-layer model, although applications are missing in both.
  Your newest paper looks great and I look forward to reading it. Is seems like a big source for ideas and inspiration. However, we would like to avoid references that were published after our work was finished because I think it will put many decisions we made in a different light. But we will of course consider this work in the future and add the respective submodels into OpenFOAM if possible.
  Entrainment model:
  We found in an earlier study that all entrainment models performed poorly. As before (Rauter and Köhler, 2020) entrainment is basically regulated by the available mountain snow cover and the exact entrainment relation does not have a big impact on results.
  We agree that the entrained snow masses have to be accelerated to the avalanche velocity. This is taken into account, at least to some extent, in the conservation equations: If the flow depth h grows due to entrainment, and the momentum hU is conserved, the velocity U decreases. We are not sure to which extent this covers your suggestion.
  What I personally like about the applied model is that the idea is somewhat consistent with damaged plasticity model (e.g. https://classes.engineering.wustl.edu/2009/spring/mase5513/abaqus/docs/v6.6/books/stm/default.htm?startat=ch04s05ath120.html).
  Thank you for the hint on the manual. Since it is a minor change I will wait for the next release (v2406) to correct it.
  
  User friendliness:
  We agree that many practitioners might be intimidated and overwhelmed by the complexity of OpenFOAM. Some (mostly students) are using it, but considering the support requests I get, there is some improvement to be made with user-friendliness. We will tone down the respective statements in the revised manuscript.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-AC2

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-210', Anonymous Referee #1, 25 Mar 2024

The manuscript presents a numerical coupling method to simulate dense flow avalanches using OpenFOAM. The work is very interesting and relevant and represents a substantial contribution to modelling science within the scope of Geoscientific Model Development. The methods and results are discussed properly. It would be interesting to know more about the reason for choosing this method and what would be alternatives (not existing). At the current state, the method is more appropriate for researchers than for practitioners as mentioned in the introduction, because of its sensitivity. Hence, more details on the possible opportunities and further developments would be relevant. Showing clearly and in more detail the possible extentions and how they could improve the results would be useful.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-RC1
- AC3: 'Reply on RC1', Matthias Rauter, 11 May 2024
  
  Dear referee,
  thank you very much for your review.
  Referee 2 send us some additional references that we will add to the manuscript as alternatives. Further we will tone down the applicability for practitioners, as referee 2 suggested as well. We will also try to discuss further developments clearer in the final manuscript.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-AC3
CEC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-210', Juan Antonio Añel, 27 Mar 2024

Dear authors,
Unfortunately, after checking your manuscript, it has come to our attention that it does not comply with our "Code and Data Policy".

https://www.geoscientific-model-development.net/policies/code_and_data_policy.html

You have archived your code on a repository not suitable for scientific publication. You must use other alternatives for long-term archival and publishing, such as Zenodo. Therefore, please, publish your code in one of the appropriate repositories, and reply to this comment with the relevant information (link and DOI) as soon as possible, as it should be available before the Discussions stage. Also, please, include in the repository the relevant primary input/output data for your experiments.
In this way, if you do not fix this problem, we will have to reject your manuscript for publication in our journal. I should note that, actually, your manuscript should not have been accepted in Discussions, given this lack of compliance with our policy. Therefore, the current situation with your manuscript is irregular.
Juan A. Añel

Geosci. Model Dev. Executive Editor

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-CEC1
- AC1: 'Reply on CEC1', Matthias Rauter, 31 Mar 2024
  
  Dear Executive Editor,
  
  thank you very much for putting our attention on this issue. Since this module is part of a larger model/framework, we included our code in the supplementary materials.
  We now also uploaded our code to Zenodo.org (https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10900454) and will update the respective part in the revised manuscript.
  
  Best regards,
  
  Matthias Rauter
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-210', Dieter Issler, 23 Apr 2024

The attached ZIP file contains the files
ref_rep_egusphere-2024-210.pdf – Reviewer's report
egusphere-2024-210.commDI.pdf – Manuscript with reviewer's annotations
If the revised manuscript were to be sent to me for review, I would very much appreciate if the authors did not reply to each of my annotations in their manuscript—just to the ones they did not implement! The journal may officially request this, but it simply does not make sense in this case.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-RC2
- EC1: 'Reply on RC2', Thomas Poulet, 24 Apr 2024
  
  Dear reviewer,
  Thank you very much for the detailed comments provided for this manuscript. I can see the annotated manuscript attached to your post (with the notes appearing when the document is downloaded and opened with Acrobat), but unfortunately not the overall report. Could you please attach that document again (ref_rep_egusphere-2024-210.pdf) as a reply to this post?
  
  Best regards,
  Thomas Poulet
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-EC1
- EC2: 'Reply on RC2: missing document attached', Thomas Poulet, 25 Apr 2024
  
  Here is the missing document (reviewer's report), posted this way for technical reasons since the discussion is now closed.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-EC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Matthias Rauter, 11 May 2024
  
  Dear Dieter,
  Thank you very much for reviewing the manuscript. We highly appreciate your opinion.
  Curvature effects:
  We mostly agree with your analysis, especially the misconception with Eq. (9). Luckily the code is not affected by this issue because it avoids expressing the curvature completely (that was the main selling point of Rauter and Tukvoic, 2018).
  We tried to connect the curvature-free approach with methods that explicitly considering curvature effects, but made some mistakes along the way. We will correct or remove the respective sections in the revised manuscript.
  We cannot follow the argument "This implies that [...] the surface derivative of scalar functions are of order (∆x)^2 and vanish in the limit ∆x -> 0" and don't think this is the case as the same argument could be made for any function.
  Curvature effects beside det J != 1 are considered in the model. The velocity vectors are constrained to the tangent plane by the basal pressure (see Rauter and Tukovic, 2018). We checked the direction of the velocity vectors as a test for the correctness for the basal pressure (among other tests). The velocity was surface tangential at all points in space and time except for small numerical errors, both in the simple quasi-1D case and the more complexly curved cases (see Rauter and Tukovic, 2018). We interpreted this as prove that the basal pressure including centrifugal forces is correct. If there is an error in the basal pressure it has a big impact on results, see e.g., this bug, where a projections was wrong: https://develop.openfoam.com/Development/openfoam/-/issues/2979. We think this misunderstanding can be attributed to the mistake we made in Eq. (9) and the second problem you found.
  Regarding the second problem you mention we fully agree with you. The main point we wanted to make is that the surface derivative can be split into a normal component (curvature effects) and tangential component. We first considered kappa as a placeholder which we didn't further specify, but wrongly connected it to Dieter-Kissling et al. (2015) at a later point. Of course it has to be a tensorial value and not the mean curvature. We will change this section.
  References:
  The work of Eglit, Grigorian, Yakimov and others is unfortunately not easily accessible and I usually end up in dead ends or being forwarded to Russian references (compare, e.g., references in Eglit et al., Geosciences, 2020). Conference papers are rarely available and complete in their description. Their influence on my work is very limited and I think that they are usually not the best references to send readers to. Foremost I miss applications, examples and simulations in the few publications that are available to me, something the other references provide. I also didn't study their work in detail and therefore feel not very comfortable citing it. So citing them is not without issues either. Anyway, we will add the review paper Eglit et al. (Geosciences, 2020) as a reference to developments in the Russian community.
  We were not aware of their two-layer model, except for the theoretical ideas I read in Eglit et al. (2020). At the point of writing we would have been very happy for some more input, especially on the coupling models. We will cite the Eglit (1998) and Issler (1998) papers as examples for a two-layer model, although applications are missing in both.
  Your newest paper looks great and I look forward to reading it. Is seems like a big source for ideas and inspiration. However, we would like to avoid references that were published after our work was finished because I think it will put many decisions we made in a different light. But we will of course consider this work in the future and add the respective submodels into OpenFOAM if possible.
  Entrainment model:
  We found in an earlier study that all entrainment models performed poorly. As before (Rauter and Köhler, 2020) entrainment is basically regulated by the available mountain snow cover and the exact entrainment relation does not have a big impact on results.
  We agree that the entrained snow masses have to be accelerated to the avalanche velocity. This is taken into account, at least to some extent, in the conservation equations: If the flow depth h grows due to entrainment, and the momentum hU is conserved, the velocity U decreases. We are not sure to which extent this covers your suggestion.
  What I personally like about the applied model is that the idea is somewhat consistent with damaged plasticity model (e.g. https://classes.engineering.wustl.edu/2009/spring/mase5513/abaqus/docs/v6.6/books/stm/default.htm?startat=ch04s05ath120.html).
  Thank you for the hint on the manual. Since it is a minor change I will wait for the next release (v2406) to correct it.
  
  User friendliness:
  We agree that many practitioners might be intimidated and overwhelmed by the complexity of OpenFOAM. Some (mostly students) are using it, but considering the support requests I get, there is some improvement to be made with user-friendliness. We will tone down the respective statements in the revised manuscript.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-AC2

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload

AR by Matthias Rauter on behalf of the Authors (22 Jun 2024) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (26 Jun 2024) by Thomas Poulet

I thank the authors for this revised version of the manuscript, which addresses successfully all comments raised by the reviewers. I found this discussion between the authors and reviewer #1 particularly instructive and I am glad that the corresponding documents will be available online for all to see, as they certainly form an interesting addition to the manuscript.
Some comments expressed by reviewer #1 pertain to the healthy scientific debate around the variety of opinions on some topics. I command both the reviewers and authors for their honest and respectful phrasing regarding all points raised, and I think the authors adequately addressed all comments, ensuring the manuscript is appropriately justifying all aspects covered in this Discussion phase. Several comments remain where the authors’ and reviewers’ views are non-aligned, but after detailed checking I am satisfied with the authors’ arguments for each of those. Many corresponding discrepancies are not issues with the manuscript but discussion points for following research. Also, it is acceptable not to follow all wording suggestions when the difference is minor and not detrimental to the readers’ understanding.
It is interesting to note the difference roles of references, which have at least two separate – and sometimes hard to reconcile – duties. They are meant to set the work in its historical perspective by attributing the origin of an idea appropriately (as often pointed out by reviewer #1), but also to provide the most useful source to clarify a point (as often done by the authors). I think the revised manuscript covers both adequately, including by referencing [Eglit, 2005], when the 1982 paper seems to be a document in Russian (cited a single time in Scopus, by the same author in their 2005 paper).
Overall, I am pleased to let the authors know that this paper is now accepted for publication.

Hide

AR by Matthias Rauter on behalf of the Authors (03 Jul 2024)

Journal article(s) based on this preprint

02 Sep 2024

OpenFOAM-avalanche 2312: depth-integrated models beyond dense-flow avalanches

Matthias Rauter and Julia Kowalski

Geosci. Model Dev., 17, 6545–6569, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-6545-2024,https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-6545-2024, 2024

Short summary

Matthias Rauter and Julia Kowalski

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-210-supplement

Matthias Rauter and Julia Kowalski

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Short summary

Snow avalanches can form large powder clouds that substantially exceed the velocity and reach of the dense core. Only a few and complex models exist to simulate this phenomenon, and the respective hazard is hard to predict. This work provides a novel flow model that focuses on simple relations while still encapsulating the significant behaviour. The model is applied to reconstruct two catastrophic powder snow avalanche events in Austria.


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