Towards transient experimental water surfaces: A new benchmark dataset for 2D shallow water solvers

In the past decade, shallow water solvers have dramatically improved both in terms of accuracy and computational power. New mathematical models and numerical schemes have been systematically verified against 1D exact solutions and laboratory experiments. Despite the two-dimensional nature of some of these benchmark tests, none of them reports complete 2D water depth fields, but only a few profiles are measured and reported in the best case. This work reports a new benchmarking dataset for validation of shallow water solvers, in which two-dimensional transient water depth measurements are available for complex steady and transient laboratory flume experiments, ranging from transcritical steady flow to dam-break flows around obstacles and complex beds. The transient water surface was measured using a commercial-grade RGB-D sensing device which allows to capture a succession of color-coded point clouds at a high frequency. These experimental measurements are compared with 2D shallow water simulations carried out with an extensively tested finite volume solver. Results asses the suitability of this dataset to perform as benchmark tests, identifying potential limitations of current and future models.