Case Study: Model to Simulate Regional Flow in South Florida
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 131, Issue 4
Abstract
South Florida has a complex regional hydrologic system that consists of thousands of miles of networked canals, sloughs, highly pervious aquifers, open areas subjected to overland flow and sheet flow, agricultural areas and rapidly growing urban areas. This region faces equally complex problems related to water supply, flood control, and water quality management. Advanced computational methods and super fast computers alone have limited success in solving modern day problems such as these because the challenge is to model the complexity of the hydrologic system, while maintaining computational efficiency and acceptable levels of numerical errors. A new, physically based hydrologic model for South Florida called the regional simulation model (RSM) is presented here. The RSM is based on object oriented design methods, advanced computational techniques, extensible markup language, and geographic information system. The RSM uses a finite volume method to simulate two-dimensional (2D) surface and groundwater flow. It is capable of working with unstructured triangular and rectangular mesh discretizations. The discretized control volumes for 2D flow, canal flow and lake flow are treated as abstract “water bodies” that are connected by abstract “water movers.” The numerical procedure is designed to work with these and many other abstractions. An object oriented code design is used to provide robust and highly extensible software architecture. A weighted implicit numerical method is used to keep the model fully integrated and stable. A limited error analysis was carried out and the results were compared with analytical error estimates. The paper describes an application of the model to the L-8 basin in South Florida and the strength of this approach in developing models over complex areas.
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Acknowlegments
The writer wishes to thank Joel Von Armen, Todd Tisdale, and Joe Park of the South Florida Water Management District for reviewing the manuscript and suggesting many technical and editorial problems. The writer also acknowledges David Welter and Clay Brown for the close teamwork that made this work possible. Jayantha Obeysekera was the director of the Hydrologic Systems Modeling Division at the time.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 131 • Issue 4 • April 2005
Pages: 247 - 258
Copyright
© 2005 ASCE.
History
Received: Apr 29, 2003
Accepted: Aug 31, 2004
Published online: Apr 1, 2005
Published in print: Apr 2005
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