Simulating the aftermath of Northern European Enclosure Dam (NEED) break and flooding of European coast

TL;DR

This paper simulates the flooding aftermath of a hypothetical dam break in Northern Europe, revealing wave propagation and permanent sea level rise, informing coastal protection strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation framework combining graph transformation and high-order wave modeling for catastrophic flood scenarios.

Findings

Wave travels at ~10 km/h after dam failure

Sea level inside dammed region rises permanently

Additional coastal barriers are recommended based on results

Abstract

The Northern European Enclosure Dam (NEED) is a hypothetical project to prevent flooding in European countries following the rising ocean level due to melting arctic glaciers. This project involves the construction of two large dams between Scotland and Norway, as well as England and France. The anticipated cost of this project is 250 to 500 billion euros. In this paper, we present the simulation of the aftermath of flooding on the European coastline caused by a catastrophic break of this hypothetical dam. From our simulation results, we can observe that there is a traveling wave after the accident, with a velocity of around 10 kilometers per hour, raising the sea level permanently inside the dammed region. This observation implies a need to construct additional dams or barriers protecting the northern coastline of the Netherlands and the interior of the Baltic Sea. Our simulations have been obtained using the following building blocks. First, a graph transformation model was applied to generate an adaptive mesh approximating the topography of the Earth. We employ the composition graph grammar model for breaking triangular elements in the mesh without the generation of hanging nodes. Second, the wave equation is formulated in a spherical latitude-longitude system of coordinates and solved by a high-order time integration scheme using the generalized $\alpha$ method.