Numerical simulation of 2D real large scale floods on GPU: the Ebro River

¹ Fluid Mechanics, LIFTEC-EINA, CSIC-University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
² Dept. Soil and Water, Aula Dei Experimental Stn., CSIC, Zaragoza, Spain

^* e-mail: echeverribar@unizar.es ^** e-mail: mmorales@eead.csic.es ^*** e-mail: brufau@unizar.es ^**** e-mail: pigar@unizar.es

Abstract

Modern flood risk management and mitigation plans incorporate the presence of numerical models that are able to assess the response of the system and to help in the decision-making processes. The shallow water system of equations (SWE) is widely used to model free surface flow evolution in river flooding. Although 1D models are usually adopted when simulating long rivers due to their computational efficiency, 2D models approximate better the behaviour in floodplains of meandering rivers using a fine mesh which implies unaffordable computations in real-world applications. However, the advances on parallelization methods accelerate computation making 2D models competitive. In particular, GPU technology offers important speed-ups which allow fast simulations of large scale scenarios. In this work, an example of the scope of this technology is presented. Several past flood events have been modelled using GPU. The physical domain (middle part of the Ebro River in Spain) has a extent of 477 km², which gives rise to a large computational grid. The steps followed to carry out the numerical simulation are detailed, as well as the comparison between numerical results and observed flooded areas reaching coincidences up to 87.25 % and speed enhancements of 1-h of simulation time for 1-day flood event. These results lead to the feasible application of this numerical model in real-time simulation tools with accurate and fast predictions useful for flood management.