Section: Application Domains

Urban Floods

Participants : Carole Delenne, Vincent Guinot, Antoine Rousseau.

Floods have been identified by the National Accounting Authority (Cour des Comptes) to represent up to 1% of the GNP in terms of damage cost. For crisis management purposes, modeling urban floods at the scale of the conurbation is highly desirable. This however cannot be achieved in the current state of technology because of the meshing and computational cost (up to one billion cells being needed to mesh an entire urban area). This can be overcome by upscaling the shallow water equations so as to obtain large scale models that can operate three orders of magnitude faster than refined 2D models. Various upscaled versions of the upscaled 2D Shallow Water Equations have been proposed in the literature, some of which by members of the Lemon team. Further developments are being carried out, including the subgrid-scale description of topography variations and a better representation of energy dissipation terms. Laboratory experiments are also needed to discriminate between the various existing models.