HARDWARE-ACCELERATED 2D FLOOD MODELLING: A CASE OF TOUS DAM

Abstract

Floods are one of the most catastrophic natural hazards, causing huge losses to lives and infrastructure every year. Floods cause by dam breaks and other damage to critical infrastructure are especially dangerous as they have the potential to cause very high magnitude disasters whose effects may not always be local. Effective flood control and risk management are key components of flood response and mitigation. To this end, flood zoning and hazard maps are prepared from flood simulations based on 1D, 2D and 1D-2D coupled models. In this project, the freeware hydraulic simulation tool BASEMENT was used on a catchment in the Jucar River basin, downstream of Tous Dam. The area under study is around 7.5 sq km and meshes of several granularities are employed. The meshes were prepared from the DTM supplied by CEDEX, the Spanish civil engineering research agency. The inflow data and ground truth data were also obtained from CEDEX. The models were calibrated to accurately capture the flow conditions and ensure consistency. A variety of meshes were prepared to assess the effect of mesh complexity on computational time. The multi-core acceleration was done via two configurations, a 4-core and a 2-core setup. The 4-core setup provided a speed up of around 43.6 % as compared to the 2-core configuration with an actual-time saving (ATS) ratio of 1.772. This workflow can be enhanced to incorporate predictive modelling approaches, provided requisite hydrological data, with adequate lead time, and fine topographic data is available. In this study, we have validated a hardware-accelerated 2D flood model that simulates the flood event caused by the 1982 failure of Tous Dam.