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Simulation of the January 2014 flood on the Secchia River using a fast and high-resolution 2D parallel shallow-water numerical scheme

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Abstract

The capability of a GPU-parallelized numerical scheme to produce accurate and fast simulations of floodings induced by levee breaches in large domains, adopting high-resolution digital terrain maps, is investigated. The good predictive skills of the presented 2D shallow-water model were proven with regard to the inundation caused by a levee breach that occurred on the Secchia River, Italy, in January 2014. The numerical computations were carried out on a domain of about 180 km2 adopting a Cartesian grid of approximately 7.2 M cells with size 5 m. The results of the simulation were validated against several field data and observations, including a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar image. A ratio of simulation to physical times of about 1/15 was achieved; this kind of simulation tool opens up new perspectives in the devising and implementing of flood event management strategies for civil protection purposes and with the aim of minimizing the economic loss.

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Acknowledgments

Interregional Agency for the Po River (AIPo) and personnel directly involved in the management of the emergency are gratefully acknowledged for providing a large amount of field data and observations. We acknowledge the CINECA Award P-FLOOD2-HP10CHAL0S, 2014, under the ISCRA initiative for the availability of high-performance computing resources and support. Luigi Romenghi is gratefully acknowledged for shooting and providing the aerial views of the flooding. The authors are grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for the valuable suggestions and constructive comments on the early version of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture, University of Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze 181/A, 43124, Parma, Italy

    Renato Vacondio, Francesca Aureli, Alessia Ferrari & Paolo Mignosa

  2. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze 53/A, 43124, Parma, Italy

    Alessandro Dal Palù

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  1. Renato Vacondio
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Correspondence to Renato Vacondio.

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Vacondio, R., Aureli, F., Ferrari, A. et al. Simulation of the January 2014 flood on the Secchia River using a fast and high-resolution 2D parallel shallow-water numerical scheme. Nat Hazards 80, 103–125 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-015-1959-4

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