ABSTRACT
During the last decade, global climate change and other human impacts such as deforestation and pollution have triggered environmental problems, in particular water-related issues such as floods and mudslides. Flow models that realistically represent the physical properties of the flow and the complex topographic features of regions prone to debris avalanches can help in hazard prediction and the mitigation of their destructive power. Numerical techniques are a necessary alternative when the phenomenon is difficult to reproduce in the laboratory due to, for example, scale and magnitude [1-4]. Many of the hydrodynamic models for reservoirs and tidal predictions are based on the solution of the depth-averaged shallow water equations using finite differences or finite element procedures. Most of these methods are based on elements or cells and depend on mesh refinement to resolve the complex topography and evolving flow features [5, 6]. However, most of the techniques that have been developed based on the shallow water equations [7] assume a small gradient of the terrain and do not consider a vertical component of the velocity.
