SWAN Course

The SWAN course is a hyperlinked text (just like this website). It is designed as an introduction to beginning SWAN users who are familiar with the fundamentals of wave dynamics but who have no experience with the practicalities of numerical wave modelling.
The course is designed to bridge the gap between the text books on ocean waves and the SWAN user manual. This makes the course useful not only for consultants which lack the capacity of introducing new staff members to shallow water wave modelling, but also for universities which give assignments to graduate students in the field of waves.
The course treats all the aspects that a beginning user is faced with, like: choice of the computational grid, choice of the incident wave field, how to do nesting in various circumstances, and how to prevent errors during the project by proper care during the initial phase. The course also suggests how to proceed if the results are incorrect or unreliable.

Subjects treated in the course are the following:

• Installing and running SWAN and the Graphical User Interface
• Choice of the computational grid, location, size, step sizes
• the influence of the lateral boundaries
• Boundary conditions
• Nesting, not only the simple case, but also more exceptional cases
• Checking input data such as bathymetry, current field etc.
• The iterative behaviour of Swan
• properties of the various source terms and how to find their values
• comparing SWAN results with observations