GEOphysical Flows with UNified models – GeoFun

The objective of the GeoFun project is to improve the modeling and simulation of geophysical flows involving at least two different processes. The main application we have in mind is water catchment areas, where a shallow free surface flow stands above a underground flow on porous medium. Our vision of water transport is often naive, because we first think of rivers, lakes, and flooding, but actually, 80\% of water in continental areas is underground. Sometimes, the porous substrate is covered with an impermeable rock stratum, which confines the flow as in pipelines, except at certain points where springs and resurgences appear.

Our long term goal is to propose a global and unified model of an aquifer. By global, we mean a complete description, including free surface flow (rivers), exchanges with the groundwater in unsaturated area, flows in caves, that might be congested or not, and might contain air pockets. By unified, we mean that we do not aim to decompose the domain and use different models for each part of the aquifer. On the contrary, we plan to propose and study models able to pick the relevant physic by themselves in a multi-physics context. The numerical approximation will be a main concern all along the way. The final contribution of the GeoFun project is the development of a scientific computing library, simulating complex flows in water catchment areas thanks to the numerical strategies analyzed in this project. Since unified models are design to be applied in the whole computational domain with no domain decomposition, the robustness of the numerical strategy at all regime are essential. Our unified numerical schemes will degenerate towards existing schemes in those regions, in order to guarantee a similar feasibility and robustness. Moreover, since the final goal is to test the library on realistic aquifers, the efficiency of the methods is of crucial importance.