Study of the adaptive refinement on an open source 2D shallow-water flow solver using quadtree grid for flash flood simulations.

Abstract:

The full resolution of shallow-water equations for modeling flash floods may have a high computational cost, so that majority of flood simulation softwares used for flood forecasting uses a simplification of this model : 1D approximations, diffusive or kinematic wave approximations or exotic models using non-physical free parameters. These kind of approximations permit to save a lot of computational time by sacrificing in an unquantified way the precision of simulations. To reduce drastically the cost of such 2D simulations by quantifying the lost of precision, we propose a 2D shallow-water flow solver built with the open source code Basilisk¹, which is using adaptive refinement on a quadtree grid. This solver uses a well-balanced central-upwind scheme, which is at second order in time and space, and treats the friction and rain terms implicitly in finite volume approach. We demonstrate the validity of our simulation on the case of the flood of Tewkesbury (UK) occurred in July 2007, as shown on Fig. 1. On this case, a systematic study of the impact of the chosen criterium for adaptive refinement is performed. The criterium which has the best computational time / precision ratio is proposed. Finally, we present the power law giving the computational time in respect to the maximum resolution and we show that this law for our 2D simulation is close to the one of 1D simulation, thanks to the fractal dimension of the topography.

[¹] http://basilisk.fr/