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Locally Relevant High-Resolution Hydrodynamic Modeling of River Floods at the Regional Scale
Andreas Buttinger-Kreuzhuber1,2, Jürgen Waser1, Daniel Cornel1
1VRVis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung Forschungs-GmbH Vienna Austria.
Water Resources Research
|July 22, 2022
Summary
This study introduces a parallel processing framework for simulating inundated areas using high-resolution flood discharges. The novel approach ensures consistent flood probabilities and accurately models local effects, improving flood hazard mapping.
Area of Science:
- Hydrology
- Environmental Engineering
- Computational Fluid Dynamics
Background:
- Accurate simulation of inundated areas is crucial for flood risk management.
- Existing models often struggle with computational efficiency and regional consistency in flood probability.
- Incorporating local topographical and infrastructural details significantly impacts flood inundation predictions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop an efficient, parallelized modeling framework for simulating large-scale flood inundation.
- To implement a novel method for ensuring regionally consistent flood peak probabilities.
- To validate the model's accuracy against measured data and existing high-quality flood maps.
Main Methods:
- Developed a parallel processing framework splitting the region into simulation tiles for efficient computation.
- Implemented on-the-fly calculation of input data and boundary conditions for each tile.
- Utilized a second-order accurate scheme to solve 2D full shallow water equations on GPUs.
- Adjusted streamflow at river nodes to simulate effective hydrographs consistent with flood quantiles.
- Accounted for local effects including buildings, culverts, levees, and retention basins.
Main Results:
- Achieved efficient parallel processing using GPUs, simulating 3 days of data for a large tile in under 3 days.
- Demonstrated good agreement between simulated and measured stage-discharge relationships at river gauges.
- Validated simulated flood hazard maps against local high-quality maps, achieving critical success index scores of 0.6-0.79.
Conclusions:
- The developed framework enables efficient and accurate simulation of flood inundation over large regions.
- The novel method for flood peak probabilities enhances the reliability of regional flood risk assessments.
- The model's ability to incorporate local effects and its computational efficiency make it a valuable tool for flood hazard mapping and management.
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