Application of Parallel Computing on Hybrid Inundation Model, Case Study: Chiayi County Flood 23-24 August 2018

Abstract

A robust 2D inundation model is needed to support flood warning systems in urban areas. The conventional 2D hydrodynamic model uses shallow water equations as the governing equation and is computationally expensive. Although the models have benefited from parallel computation techniques, some issues remain. As an alternative, many flood models have been developed using different approaches, such as Cellular Automata (CA), DEM-based (DBM), and data-driven models. The hybrid inundation model (HIM) was developed by combining the CA-DBM concepts. The purpose of this study is to implement the parallel computation technique to increase the efficiency of HIM. The model performance was evaluated using the historical flood event in Chiayi County, Taiwan. Results showed that there is no significant difference between HIM and TUFLOW in terms of flood depth estimation, even though TUFLOW included the drainage system within the analysis. These results proved that the drainage system was not working during the event. HIM and TUFLOW give underestimated flood depth prediction compared to the observed data. The main reason because the observed data was obtained from local community testimonies. Hence, there might be many uncertainties in the observed data value. Finally, the parallelization process successfully decreased the computation time of the original HIM. The computation was decreased from 450 to 11 minutes depending on the number of cores used in the simulation.