This course is designed to introduce students to different ways in which flow and transport processes can be modeled in natural environments. The course is neither an advanced numerical methods course nor a pure model application course. Rather, it is designed to give students a basic understanding of numerical approaches to modeling rivers and estuaries and to expose students to different levels of model resolution and capabilities. The first half of the course is geared towards theory and coding of simple examples. The second half of the course focuses on modeling more complex environments with open-source or freely available computational resources. While there are no graduate level prerequisites for the course, it would be highly advantageous for a student to have had some exposure to graduate level fluid mechanics.
The course material will assume that students are familiar with the differential form of the equations of motion and
transport.