Exercising a Deterministic Mine Burial Prediction System for Impact and Scour Burial Using Operational Data Sets

This paper presents results and analysis from exercising an aquatic mine burial prediction (MBP) system based on deterministic models to simulate impact and scour burial experiments using operational or operational-like inputs. Based on nonparametric hypothesis testing of simulation results with empirical data, the statistics generated from simulations of impact burial appear to provide useful predictions and uncertainty estimates when the simulations account for geotechnical variations. For scour burial, the use of the simulating waves nearshore model to drive a scour model is examined. Model predictions qualitatively followed empirical burial trends, with variations in waveheight prediction appearing to be a more significant factor in determining the accuracy of the scour burial prediction than uncertainty in grain size. Overall, the tests provide encouragement for the use of new MBP models to provide reasonable predictions of burial from operational input data.