Should we care about the spatial heterogeneity in coral reefs under unidirectional turbulent flows?

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Hauptverfasser: Patil, Akshay, García-Sánchez, Clara
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Patil, Akshay
García-Sánchez, Clara
author_facet Patil, Akshay
García-Sánchez, Clara
contents In this work, we systematically investigate the similarities and differences observed between a hydraulically rough wall comprised of an array of cylinders, massive corals, and branching corals arranged in a staggered manner, along with a stochastically generated coral bed using a scale-resolving computational framework. Our data suggests that for all the flow parameters of interest, there is a substantial difference observed between the stochastic coral bed and the regularly arranged coral bed. By analysing the double-averaged statistics and time-averaged spatial heterogeneity in the hydrodynamic response, we explain the differences observed between the four cases that bring out significant local effects. These observations have important consequences for modelling coral-like roughness in numerical and experimental settings to better understand the mean flow statistics and the spatial heterogeneity induced as a consequence of the underlying coral geometry. Our results can help inform the coastal ocean modelling efforts to further improve the inclusion of coral heterogeneity within two-equation closure models by further investigating the impact of spatially stochastic, rough bottom boundary layers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03021
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Should we care about the spatial heterogeneity in coral reefs under unidirectional turbulent flows?
Patil, Akshay
García-Sánchez, Clara
Fluid Dynamics
Geophysics
In this work, we systematically investigate the similarities and differences observed between a hydraulically rough wall comprised of an array of cylinders, massive corals, and branching corals arranged in a staggered manner, along with a stochastically generated coral bed using a scale-resolving computational framework. Our data suggests that for all the flow parameters of interest, there is a substantial difference observed between the stochastic coral bed and the regularly arranged coral bed. By analysing the double-averaged statistics and time-averaged spatial heterogeneity in the hydrodynamic response, we explain the differences observed between the four cases that bring out significant local effects. These observations have important consequences for modelling coral-like roughness in numerical and experimental settings to better understand the mean flow statistics and the spatial heterogeneity induced as a consequence of the underlying coral geometry. Our results can help inform the coastal ocean modelling efforts to further improve the inclusion of coral heterogeneity within two-equation closure models by further investigating the impact of spatially stochastic, rough bottom boundary layers.
title Should we care about the spatial heterogeneity in coral reefs under unidirectional turbulent flows?
topic Fluid Dynamics
Geophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03021