A meshless multilayer model for a coastal system by radial basis functions

A multilayer computational model for simulating three-dimensional tidal flows in coastal waters is presented in this paper. A truly meshless numerical scheme based on radial basis functions (RBFs) is employed to obtain an accurate approximation to the solution of the model. For computational efficiency in solving large-scale problems, a noniterative domain decomposition method is combined with the use of the RBFs scheme. To smooth the numerical simulation of the advection across each subdomain, the commonly used upstream technique is also incorporated. Finally, for numerical verification, the proposed multilayer model is successfully used to obtain a stable and convergent simulation of the water flows in the Pearl River Estuary of the South China Sea. The numerical approximations exhibit good agreement with the observed tidal and current data. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.