Impacts of Elevation Data Spatial Resolution on Two-Dimensional Dam Break Flood Simulation and Consequence Assessment
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 140, Issue 2
Abstract
In the United States, there are approximately 84,000 dams including approximately 14,000 dams that are classified as high hazard. Approximately 50% of high hazard dams do not have an emergency action plan (EAP), a document describing potential emergency conditions and potential areas at risk of flooding. A critical data set required for identifying flood risk regions through modeling and simulation is digital elevation models (DEM). These data have become increasingly available at high resolution. The difficulty in utilizing the higher resolution data is that model computation time is increased drastically and becomes, in the case of wide-area (regional) analyses, infeasible to use. The tendency for modelers, therefore, is to use lower resolution data for these model applications. It is clear that when using the lower resolution data that topographic features are not represented as well, but it is not as clear what impact this has on two-dimensional modeling and flood risk estimation. Additionally, there is no rule of thumb as to which resolution should be used. This paper evaluates the impact grid resolution has on estimating the flood risk area resulting from dam failures using two-dimensional models. Results indicate that while flood extent, depths, and flood wave timing are sensitive to grid resolution, socioeconomic metrics such as population at risk and economic loss are less sensitive to simulation grid resolution. This observed socioeconomic insensitivity validates the potential of using coarse resolution simulation as a flood screening tool or in emergency response situations.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
ASCE. (2009). “Infrastructure report card.” 〈http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/2009/sites/default/files/RC2009_full_report.pdf〉 (Oct. 2010).
Bates, P. D., and De Roo, A. P. J. (2000). “A simple raster-based model for flood inundations simulation.” J. Hydrol. (Amsterdam), 236, 54–77.
Beffa, C., and Connell, R. J. (2001). “Two-dimensional flood plain flow: Model description.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 6(5), 397–405.
Begnudelli, L., and Sanders, B. F. (2007). “Simulation of the St. Francis dam-break flood.” J. Eng. Mech., 133(11), 1200–1212.
Bhaduri, B., Bright, E., Coleman, P., and Urban, M. (2007). “LandScan USA: A high-resolution geospatial and temporal modeling approach for population distribution and dynamics.” GeoJ., 69, 103–117.
Bradford, S. F., and Sanders, B. F. (2002). “Finite-volume model for shallow-water flooding of arbitrary topography.” J. Hydraul. Eng., 128(3), 289–298.
FEMA. (2004). “Federal guidelines for dam safety: Emergency action planning for dam owners.” Washington, DC 〈www.fema.gov/library/file;jsessionid=F7FBC51755A1E167AB98C2E8C3A17652.Worker2Library?type=publishedFile&file=fema-64.pdf&fileid=e57c1790-1e55-11db-b486-000bdba87d5b〉.
FEMA. (2007). “Emergency action planning for state regulated high-hazard potential dams: Findings, recommendations, and strategies.” Washington, DC 〈www.fema.gov/library/viewRecord.do?id=3122〉.
Fread, D. (1991). The NWS DAMBRK model: Theoretical background/user documentation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service, Silver Spring, MD.
Haile, A. T., and Rientjes, T. H. (2005). “Effects of LiDAR DEM resolution in flood modelling: A model sensitivity study for the city of Teguciagalpa, Honduras.” Remote sensing and spatial information sciences, 36, 168–173.
Horritt, M. S., and Bates, P. D. (2002). “Evaluation of 1D and 2D numerical models for predicting river flood inundation.” J. Hydrol. (Amsterdam), 268(1–4), 87–99.
Hudock, G. W. (2006). “Dam failure inundation zone modeling.” The Georgia Engineer, August/September, 32–33.
Judi, D. (2009). “Fast response flood estimation model documentation report.” Technical Rep. LA-UR 0807950, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM.
Judi, D., Burian, S., and McPherson, T. (2011). “Improvements in fast-response flood modeling: Desktop parallel computing and domain tracking.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 25(3), 184–191.
Kalyanpu, A., Judi, D., Shankar, S., Pardyjak, E., and Burian, S., (2011). “Assessment of GPU computational enhancement to a 2D flood model.” Environ. Modell. Softw., 26(8), 1009–1016.
Lamb, R., Crossley, M., and Waller, S. (2009). “A fast 2D floodplain inundation model.” Proc. Inst. Civ. Eng.: Water Manage., 162(6), 363–370.
Liao, C. B., Wu, M. S., and Liang, S. J. (2007). “Numerical simulation of a dam break for an actual river terrain environment.” Hydrologic. Process., 21, 447–460.
Lin, G. F., Lai, J. S., and Guo, W. D. (2003). “Finite-volume component-wise TVD schemes for 2D shallow water equations.” Adv. Water Res., 26, 861–873.
Marks, K., and Bates, P. (2000). “Integration of high-resolution topographic data with floodplain flow models.” Hydrologic. Process., 14, 2109–2122.
McPherson, T. N., and Brown, M. J. (2004). “Estimating daytime and nighttime population distributions in U.S. cities for emergency response activities.” Proc., Symp. on Planning, Nowcasting, and Forecasting in the Urban Zone, 84th AMS Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA.
National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC). (2008). “FastECON tool summary report: Fiscal year 2008.” LA-UR 09-00558, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM.
National Research Council (NRC). (2009). Mapping the zone: Flood map accuracy, National Academies Press, Washington, DC.
Neal, J., Fewtrell, T., and Trigg, M. (2009). “Parallelisation of storage cell flood models using OpenMP.” Environ. Modell. Simul., 24, 872–877.
Neelz, S., Hall, J., and Pender, G. (2007). “Improving the performance of fast flood inundation models by incorporating results from very high resolution simulations.” Flood Risk Assessment II, Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications, September.
Sanders, B. F. (2007). “Evaluation of on-line DEMs for flood inundation modeling.” Adv. Water Resour., 30, 1831–1843.
Transportation Research Board (TRB). (2006). “Criteria for selecting hydraulic models.” 〈http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/nchrp_w106.pdf〉.
Whitsel, E., et al., (2006). “Accuracy of commercial geocoding: Assessment and implications.” Epidemiolog. Perspect. Innov., 3(8), 3–8.
Wu, S., Li, J., and Huang, G. H. (2008). “A study on DEM-derived primary topographic attributes for hydrologic applications: Sensitivity to elevation data resolution.” Appl. Geogr., 28, 210–223.
Yu, D., and Lane, S. N. (2006). “Urban fluvial flood modelling using a two-dimensional diffusion-wave treatment, Part 1: Mesh resolution effects.” Hydrologic. Process., 20, 1541–1565.
Zhou, J., Causon, D. M., Minham, C. G., and Ingram, D. (2004). “Numerical prediction of dam-break flows in general geometries with complex bed topography.” J. Hydraul. Eng., 130(4), 332–340.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 140 • Issue 2 • February 2014
Pages: 194 - 200
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 7, 2011
Accepted: Jul 30, 2012
Published online: Aug 15, 2012
Discussion open until: Jan 15, 2013
Published in print: Feb 1, 2014
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.