Author(s): Michaela Jud; Florian Schwertfirm; Christoph Rapp; Matthaus Schilcher
Linked Author(s): Christoph Rapp
Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: Recent flood events like the massive catastrophes in Pakistan and Thailand have shown the devastating impact that such events can have on people and property. Flood warning and forecasting systems can help to reduce damages through early evacuation from areas at risk and to move possessions to safe places. With sufficient warning, temporary defense can also be installed to mitigate the effects of flooding. Especially in mountainous regions such as in the Alps an efficient prediction is important if sudden heavy rainfall events occur. Well founded decisions can only be made with real time simulations of such events. Within this paper an innovative method of coupling a geographical information system and a hydrodynamic model is being presented. The generation of the simulation grid is done in ArcG IS using standard tools and developed Python-scripts. The ArcG IS-tool is very user-friendly and flexible which ensures secure handling. The massive parallelization of the hydrodynamic model makes real time computations even possible. With this tool real time predictions are feasible to support the flood warning and forecasting systems.
Year: 2012