Amazon flood wave hydraulics

A bathymetric survey of 575 km of the central Amazon River and one of its tributaries, the Purus, are combined with gauged data to characterise the Amazon flood wave, and for hydraulic modelling of the main channel for the period June 1995-March 1997 with the LISFLOOD-FP and HEC-RAS hydraulic models. Our investigations show that the Amazon flood wave is subcritical and diffusive in character and, due to shallow bed slopes, backwater conditions control significant reach lengths and are present for low and high water states. Comparison of the different models shows that it is necessary to include at least the diffusion term in any model, and the RMSE error in predicted water elevation at all cross sections introduced by ignoring the acceleration and advection terms is of the order of 0.02-0.03 m. The use of a wide rectangular channel approximation introduces an error of 0.10-0.15 m on the predicted water levels. Reducing the bathymetry to a simple bed slope and with mean cross section only, introduces an error in the order of 0.5 m. These results show that when compared to the mean annual amplitude of the Amazon flood wave of 11-12 m, water levels are relatively insensitive to the bathymetry of the channel model. The implication for remote sensing studies of the central Amazon channel, such as those proposed with the Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission (SWOT), is that even relatively crude assumptions regarding the channel bathymetry will be valid in order to derive discharge from water surface slope of the main channel, as long as the mean channel area is approximately correct. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Modeling large-scale inundation of Amazonian seasonally flooded wetlands

This paper presents the first application and validation of a 2D hydrodynamic model of the Amazon at a large spatial scale. The simulation results suggest that a significantly higher proportion of total flow is routed through the floodplain than previously thought. We use the hydrodynamic model LISFLOOD-FP with topographic data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission to predict floodplain inundation for a 240 × 125 km section of the central Amazon floodplain in Brazil and compare our results to satellite-derived estimates of inundation extent, existing gauged data and satellite altimetry. We find that model accuracy is good at high water (72% spatial fit; 0.99 m root mean square error in water stage heights), while accuracy drops at low water (23%; 3.17 m) due to incomplete drainage of the floodplain resulting from errors in topographic data and omission of floodplain hydrologic processes from this initial model. Copyright 2007 by the American Geophysical Union

Simplified two-dimensional numerical modelling of coastal flooding and example applications

In this paper we outline the development and application of a simple two-dimensional hydraulic model for use in assessments of coastal flood risk. Such probabilistic assessments typically need evaluation of many thousands of model simulations and hence computationally efficient codes of the type described here are required. The code, LISFLOOD-FP, uses a storage cell approach discretized as a regular grid and calculates the flux between cells explicitly using analytical relationships derived from uniform flow theory. The resulting saving in computational cost allows fine spatial resolution simulations of regional scale flooding problems within minutes or a few hours on a standard desktop PC. The development of the code for coastal applications is described, followed by an evaluation of its performance against four test cases representing a variety of flooding problems at different scales. For three of these cases an observed flood extent is available to compare to model predictions. In each case the model is able to match the observed shoreline to within the error of the of the observed flow, topography and validation data and outperforms a non-model flood extent prediction made using a simple Geographical Information System (GIS) technique

A mixing length model for estimating channel conveyance

This paper describes a simple, physically based mixing length model that explains the functional form of Manning's equation for mean velocity in open channels. Manning's equation has been used to describe mean velocity for over 100 years and is essentially an empirical result rather than being based on an understanding of physical processes. The model described in this paper uses Prandtl's mixing length hypothesis, with mixing length modelled at each point within the cross-section being proportional to the distance to the nearest solid boundary. The model solves equations for the along-stream velocity field using a simple numerical method on regular and irregular finite-difference meshes. The results of the model are compared with Manning's equation and the Colebrook–White formula, giving good agreement across a range of channel sizes, roughnesses and geometries. The results and comparison are used to draw useful insights into open channel flows