High-resolution 2D shallow water modelling of dam failure floods for emergency action plans

Abstract

This paper presents a procedure based on high-resolution shallow water modelling for assessing dam-failure hypothetical scenarios that can be useful for designing emergency action plans. The capability of accurately predicting the areas flooded by these catastrophic events, both in terms of timing and magnitude, represents indeed a key task for emergency planning. The proposed procedure relies on the adoption of a parallel two-dimensional shallow water numerical model capable of both preventing large computational times and enabling the use of high-resolution meshes without introducing approximations in the set of the governing equations. Criteria for selecting the numerical model, the input data such as bathymetry, and the initial conditions are analysed in detail. The procedure is adopted to model the flooding scenarios induced by the failure of two dams in northern Italy built for irrigation and flood mitigation purposes, respectively.