Introduction to River Flood Modelling (WSE/HI/08A/e)

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of hydraulics and hydrology

Learning objectives

On completion of this module the participants are able to:

understand and explain the main flood management problems;
understand and explain the governing processes of flood generation and propagation;
identify the proper modelling methodology for a given problem;
utilise their hands-on experience in the step-by-step modelling procedure (geometry, bathymetry, boundary conditions, forcing) needed to carry out a practical study with MIKE11, SOBEK 1D or HEC-RAS package;
know how the river flood model may be used for structural and non-structural measures for flood mitigation.

Syllabus

Application domains of Hydroinformatics: floods, urban systems and environment, R. K. Price (IHE), Z. Vojinovic (IHE) and A. Mynett IHE)
Introduction to floods and flooding. Introduction to urban floods and urban water systems. Introduction to environmental systems.
Environmental processes and water quality, H. J. Lubberding (IHE)
Environmental processes. Water quality problems from a modelling point of view: outfalls, BOD-DO, eutrophication, toxic substances, best technical means approach, water quality objectives approach; Properties of the natural system from a modelling point of view, residence times, time scales of transport processes compared with those of water quality processes, spatial scales of phenomena, link between transport of substances and water quality processes.
Climate change and its impact on hydrology, S. Uhlenbrook (IHE)
Climate change problematique. Global, regional and local climate models, development of climate change scenarios. Effects of climate variability on the hydrology that affects rainfall-runoff processes in river-basins.
Introduction to uncertainty analysis, D.P. Solomatine (IHE)
Sources of uncertainty; representations of uncertainty. Methods of analysing model uncertainty: analytical, approximation-, model error-based, Bayesian, Monte-Carlo and optimal design. Parallel and cloud computing in the analysis of computationally-intensive models.
Introduction to 1D2D, 2D Modelling (I. Popescu)
Introduction to the basic principles of 1D2D and 2D modelling.
River Flood Modelling and 1D Flood Routing (R.K. Price, I. Popescu, B. Bhattacharya)
Nature and characteristics of floods: flood analysis – e.g. flood probability - probability and return period analysis of hydrological events and design floods - and estimation of peak flows (using Flood Estimation Handbook (FEH and ReFH) methods, catchment characteristics method, storm hydrographs and unit hydrograph methods
River Flooding Modelling:

The significance of overbank flow, floodplain behaviour and stage discharge prediction (using the Ackers Method and Conveyance Estimate System)
Modelling flood propagation - flood routing
hydrological methods – Muskingum, reservoir routing, HEC-HMS
1D hydraulic flood routing/modelling in rivers
The Conveyance Estimate System; modelling resistance for discharge estimation.
Introduction to ‘HEC-RAS’ software
Discussion of sustainable flood alleviation methods