Clawpack — The Complete Guide: Tsunamis, Floods and Conservation Laws with GeoClaw
Clawpack (Conservation Laws Package) is an open-source (BSD) collection of finite-volume methods for solving hyperbolic systems of conservation laws — shock waves, shallow-water equations, acoustics and more. Its development was led by Randall LeVeque, and it is widely used in research and teaching.
Clawpack
Clawpack Development Team (Randall LeVeque et al.)
Finite-volume methods for hyperbolic conservation laws — including GeoClaw for tsunamis, floods and geophysical flows.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Classic — basic finite-volume solvers in one and two dimensions.
- AMRClaw — adaptive mesh refinement that concentrates effort only where the wave is.
- GeoClaw — tsunamis, floods, dam breaks and landslides over real topography.
- PyClaw — a Python interface and parallel computing.
- Visclaw — tools for plotting results and making animations.
What to know before you start
There is no graphical interface. You set up problems in Python files, some solvers are written in Fortran and compiled when you run, and installation targets Linux and macOS (on Windows, via WSL). It suits water and coastal engineers, researchers and graduate students willing to work at the command line. Publications are asked to cite Clawpack.
Related tools
For floods and tsunamis on a triangular mesh with a Python interface — ANUGA. For two-phase flows on adaptive meshes — Basilisk. For engineering coastal and river models — TELEMAC-MASCARET.
ANUGA
ANU and Geoscience Australia (anuga community)
A 2D shallow-water model for floods, tsunamis and storm surge on unstructured meshes, as a Python library.
Get it from the vendor
Basilisk
Stéphane Popinet (CNRS)
Flow solver on adaptive Cartesian meshes — the successor of Gerris, especially strong for free-surface flows and droplets.
Get it from the vendor
TELEMAC-MASCARET
EDF / Consortium
Hydrodynamic system for rivers and coasts on unstructured meshes — flow, waves, sediment and quality.
Get it from the vendor
XBeach
Deltares
Storm impact on the coast — overwash, dune erosion and barrier breaching in a single extreme event.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Clawpack, and GeoClaw in particular, are established free tools for tsunami and flood modelling. They require comfort with code, but offer full transparency and high-quality numerical methods.