The applicability of the shallow water equations for modelling violent wave overtopping

The shallow water equations (SWE) have been used to model a series of experiments examining violent wave overtopping of a near-vertical sloping structure with impacting wave conditions. A finite volume scheme was used to solve the shallow water equations. A monotonic reconstruction method was applied to eliminate spurious oscillations and ensure proper treatment of bed slope terms. Both the numerical results and physical observations of the water surface closely followed the relevant Rayleigh probability distributions. However, the numerical model overestimated the wave heights and suffered from the lack of dispersion within the shallow water equations. Comparisons made on dimensionless parameters for the overtopping discharge and percentage of waves overtopping between the numerical model and the experimental observations indicated that for the lesser impacting waves, the shallow water equations perform satisfactorily and provide a good alternative to computationally more expensive methods.