Enhancing river model set-up for 2-D dynamic flood modelling

Abstract

Flood hazard mapping is a topic of increasing interest involving several aspects in which a series of progress steps have occurred in recent years. Among these, a valuable advance has been performed in solving 2-D shallow water equations in complex topographies and in the use of high resolution topographic data. However, reliable predictions of flood-prone areas are not simply related to these two important aspects. A key element is the accurate set up of the river model. This is primarily related to the representation of the topography but also requires particular attention to the insertion of man-made structures and hydrological data within the computational domain. There is the need to use procedures able to 1) obtain a reliable computational domain, characterized by a total number of elements feasible for a common computing machine, starting from the huge amount of data provided by a LIDAR survey, 2) deal with river reach that receives significant lateral inflows, 3) insert bridges, buildings, weirs and all the structures that can interact with the flow dynamics. All these issues have large effects on the modelled water levels and flow velocities but there are very few papers in the literature on these topics in the framework of the 2-D modelling. So, in this work, attention is focused on the techniques to deal with the above-mentioned issues, showing their importance in flood mapping using two actual case studies in Southern Italy. In particular, the simulations showed in this paper highlight the presence of backwater effects, sudden and numerous changes in the flow regime, induced by the detailed river model, that underline the importance of using 2-D fully dynamic unsteady flow equations for flood mapping.