Calculating basin-scale free oscillations in lakes on a rotating Earth

A novel method is presented for numerically calculating the free modes of oscillation in closed rotating water basins of arbitrary shape based on a symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (SIP-DG) finite element method (FEM). The new method is flexible and is shown to work well for any basin that has been appropriately triangulated with finite element mesh generation software. To illustrate the method's capabilities, the modes of both idealized and real-world lakes are computed and discussed. •A new method for computing free modes in closed rotating water basins is presented.•The method is validated against known solutions and good agreement is shown.•Real-world example results are presented for Pinehurst Lake, AB, Canada.