Paul Bates (School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, UK). Developing a shallow water model for mapping global scale flood hazard at 100m resolution.

Flooding is a global problem, with the largest and most damaging events typically occurring over whole regions rather than just in specific catchments or along particular river reaches. Moreover, many years of research have shown that skilful predictions require a lot of local detail and that properly representing the physics of flood flows requires numerical solutions of the shallow water equations.  The requirement to perform computations at high resolution to obtain sufficient local detail has, until recently, prevented the wide area application of shallow water codes.  This presentation describes the development of highly efficient numerical solution of a simplified form of the shallow water equations and its use with high throughput computing systems to develop continental and even global scale applications.  The presentation covers the mathematical development, analysis of the application limits of the scheme and a demonstration of its application at global scales.

Figure: a 90m resolution 1 in 100 year return period flood hazard map for Africa.