Flood Inundation Modeling with an Adaptive Quadtree Grid Shallow Water Equation Solver
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 134, Issue 11
Abstract
Flood risk studies require hydraulic modeling in order to estimate flow depths and other hydraulic variables in the floodplain for a wide range of input conditions. Currently there is a need to improve the computational efficiency of fully two-dimensional numerical models for large-scale flood simulation. This paper describes an adaptive quadtree grid-based shallow water equation solver and demonstrates its capability for flood inundation modeling. Due to the grid dynamically adapting to dominant flow features such as steep water surface gradients and wet-dry fronts, the approach is both efficient and accurate. The quadtree model is applied to a realistic scenario of flood inundation over an urban area of , resulting from the flood defenses breaching at Thamesmead on the River Thames, United Kingdom. The results of the simulation are in close agreement with alternative predictions obtained using the commercially available software TUFLOW.
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Acknowledgments
The DEM and TUFLOW results for the Thamesmead case study were provided by Professor Gary Pender and Dr. Sylvain Néelz of the United Kingdom Flood Risk Management Research Consortium (EPSRC Grant No. EPSRC-GBGR/S76304/01).
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 134 • Issue 11 • November 2008
Pages: 1603 - 1610
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Received: May 17, 2007
Accepted: Apr 24, 2008
Published online: Nov 1, 2008
Published in print: Nov 2008
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