Thetis is an open-source, finite element framework for simulating coastal and estuarine flows with advanced numerics, high flexibility, and easy extensibility.
Thetis builds on the Firedrake finite element library to provide robust solvers for 2D/3D shallow water equations and related physical processes in the coastal ocean.
✅ 2D depth-averaged and 3D baroclinic shallow water solvers
✅ Wetting and drying schemes for realistic coastlines
✅ Scalar transport (salinity, temperature, tracers)
✅ Adjoint capabilities for data assimilation and inverse modeling
✅ Flexible unstructured meshes
✅ Open-source and easily extensible Python codebase
📚 Full documentation and installation instructions are available at thetisproject.org
Thetis relies on Firedrake — please follow the Firedrake installation instructions first.
Then, to install Thetis:
# Non-editable latest install - see website for editable install!
pip install git+https://github.com/thetisproject/thetis.gitTo get up and running with Thetis once it has been installed, we recommend checking out the basic tutorials and
documentation. Further examples can then be found in the
repository at examples. See examples/README.md for
detailed descriptions of each example script.
Check the website for ways of reaching out to developers!
If Thetis is helpful in your research, please cite:
Kärnä, T., Kramer, S. C., Mitchell, L., Ham, D. A., & Piggott, M. D. (2018).
Thetis coastal ocean model: discontinuous Galerkin discretization for the three-dimensional hydrostatic equations.
Geoscientific Model Development, 11(11), 4359–4382.
DOI
Thetis is available under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.