Clawpack Tutorial

Randall J. LeVeque

Clawpack (Conservation Laws Package) is an open source software package for solving hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations in one or more space dimensions, both with and without source terms. Equations of this type appear in a wide variety of wave propagation problems arising in nearly all fields of science and engineering. Applications include acoustics in the atmosphere or ocean, elastic waves such as seismic waves in the earth or ultrasound waves in biological materials, shock waves in aerodynamics or astrophysics, tsunamis and storm surge, detonation waves, traffic jams, and electromagnetic waves such as light pulses.

High resolution shock-capturing finite volume methods are implemented in Clawpack on logically rectangular grids (Cartesian or mapped grids). Adaptive mesh refinement capabilities are included. The core routines are in Fortran and the user interface and graphics capabilities have recently been converted to Python. A number of sample applications are included with the code.

This tutorial will be a hands-on demonstration of how to install the package, try out the sample applications, and set up a new problem, with some discussion of the plotting routines and use of adaptive refinement.

Documentation and a gallery of some applications can be viewed at http://www.clawpack.org/doc.