Answers to comments/critique on our Bore-Soliton-Splash research

• 1. How can you call it [the bore-soliton-splash] an "experiment", it happened only once and all the measurements were not proper?
  The experiment was done in total nine times in the main tank, see the poster link below. On 26th Sept. 2010 we did seven experiments with different water levels in the main channel and in the sluice gate. Two of these were repeats with 41cm in the main channel and 90 cm in the sluice gate. They yielded the highest splash recorded in the channel on the "Science and Education" square. The operator on the excavator was trained to remove the sluice gate as well as possible with the same speed. On the 30th of Sept. 2010 this experiment with the highest splash was repeated again at the opening event of the "Science and Education" square. Unfortunately, the sluice gates were later destroyed, notwithstanding our granted request to keep them for further experiments. The recording of the water level heights was correct within 1cm. We did what we could do to capture the main phenomena involved, and did three repeat experiments for the most extreme case. More pilot experiments were done in the Roombeek channel and in the portable mini-channel, see the movie links below.
  
• 2. How can you talk about the Tohoku tsunami, you are not engineers?
  Prof. Nakamura and Dr. Solomon (in GeoScience at the University of Chicago, not in engineering) suggested us to look at the extreme run-up cases of Tohoku tsunami run-up in converging valleys. This happened at the 4th Wave Flow Interaction meeting at the University of Cambridge, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, where the poster presented by Elena Gagarina, with assistance by Dr. Colin Cotter, was well received. Prof. Nakamura also pointed out the Lekkas et al. (2011) reference on the Tohoku Tsunami used in the poster and article links found below. Two of the four authors are also engineers.
  
• 3. Why don't you use Navier-Stokes equations immediately? Why are you going to use something else?
  The role of viscous effects is secondary till the point of jet break-up. To predict the wave-jet phenomena observed, asymptotic water wave models appear to be good candidate models for faster prediction of the events involved. One of the models is the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) equation. Recently, exact solutions of the KP-equation were found that asymptotically fit a slightly adapated version of the bore-soliton-splash event. These were found by and after discussion with Prof. Yuji Kodama at the 2011 Rogue Waves meeting in Dresden. (For the ingenious solitions by Prof. Yuji Kodama, see the link in the NTvN-article below). Of course, the splash event is a nice test case for all these models, including the Navier-Stokes equations with a free surface, with or without explicit inclusion of the effects of air. The advantage of the approximate models is that they may be more useful in the development of an optimization theory, with the aim to explain under which conditions we can expect the highest splash. They simply involve less degrees of freedom which makes the calculation more maneagable, or maneagable at all. We are also in the process of performing brute-force simulations with the incompressible Navier-Stokes and/or incompressible Euler equations with a free surface.
  
• 4. Why don't you call the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation the two-dimensional Kortweg-de-Vries equation?
  In Drazin's text book "Solions: an introduction", it indeeds says "two-dimensional Korteweg-de-Vries equation (sometimes also called the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation)". In the literature, people by and large refer to the equation as the KP-equation. It is a good question, which authors can claim the first (published and peer-reviewed) derivation of the KP-equation?

• O.B., Elena Gagarina, Wout Zweers, Anthony Thornton (2011): Bore Soliton Splash van spektakel naar oceaangolf? Ned. Tijdschrift voor Natuurkunde. Popular Science article in Dutch.
• Posters (in English) presented by Elena Gagarina at the EGU General Assembly in Vienna (2010), 4th Wave Flow Interaction Meeting Cambridge (2011), and the Alumni Days in Twente (2011); latest poster.
• Wout Zweers (2010): Web page and movies.
• O.B. Presentation at the Rogue Waves meeting, Dresden, 7-11 Nov. 2011: A Rogue Bore-Soliton-Splash. Low resolution; links in italics not working: films via Zweers You Tube