Hydrodynamic Floodplain Modelling in the Urban Area Using Remotely Sensed Digital Elevation Models

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchiv

A coarse-grid approach to representing building blockage effects in 2D urban flood modelling

Copyright © 2012 Elsevier. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Hydrology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Hydrology, Vol. 426-427, pp. 1-16 (March 2012), DOI: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2012.01.007The latest information and communications technology has enabled flood modelling in urban areas using high quality terrain data to simulate the detailed flow dynamics in local areas. However, the computational cost rises exponentially as the resolution goes finer. The advance of computing hardware is still a limiting factor for large-scale area or risk/uncertainty analysis modelling with fine resolution that describes the details of building features. Grid coarsening is the straightforward way to reduce the computing efforts for 2D flood modelling. The traditional approach to grid coarsening usually takes the average elevation of a fine grid as the new terrain model for the coarse grid. This approach often results in loss of information that introduces errors to modelling. In this study, the building features in coarse grids were abstracted using the building coverage ratio (BCR) and the conveyance reduction factor (CRF) parameters in a 2D model to simulate flooding in urban areas. The outcome of 2D case studies showed the proposed model can minimise the errors due to terrain averaging and provide a much better accuracy of modelling results at a marginally increased computing cost

(Multi)wavelets increase both accuracy and efficiency of standard Godunov-type hydrodynamic models: robust 2D approaches

Multiwavelets (MW) enable the compression, analysis and assembly of model data on a multiresolution grid within Godunov-type solvers based on second-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG2) and first-order finite volume (FV1) methods. Multiwavelet adaptivity has been studied extensively with one-dimensional (1D) hydrodynamic models (Kesserwani et al., 2019), revealing that MWDG2 can be 20 times faster than uniform DG2 and 2 times faster than uniform FV1, while preserving the accuracy and robustness of the underlying formulation. The potential of the MWDG2 scheme has yet to be studied for two-dimensional (2D) modelling, but this requires a design that robustly and efficiently solves the 2D shallow water equations (SWE) with complex source terms and wetting and drying. This paper presents a two-dimensional MWDG2 scheme that: (1) adopts a slope-decoupled DG2 solver as a reference scheme, for its ability to deliver well-balanced piecewise-planar solutions shaped by a simplified 3-component basis; and, (2) adapts the multiresolution analysis of multiwavelets for compatibility with the slope-decoupled DG2 basis. A scaled reformulation of slope-decoupled DG2 is presented alongside two multiwavelet approaches that yield MWDG2 schemes with similar properties, and a Haar wavelet FV1 (HFV1) variant for adapting piecewise-constant model data. The performance of the adaptive HFV1 and MWDG2 solvers is explored alongside their uniform counterparts, while analysing their accuracy, efficiency, grid-coarsening ability, reliability in handling wet-dry fronts across steep bed-slopes, and ability to capture features relevant to practical hydraulic modelling. The results indicate a particular multiwavelet approach that allows the MWDG2 scheme to exploit its grid-coarsening ability for the widest range of flow types. Results also indicate that the proposed (multi)wavelet-based adaptive schemes are even more efficient for the 2D case. Accompanying model software is openly available online