Cloud Flood Modelling

Flood Modelling for Cities using Cloud Computing

Assessment of pluvial flood risk is particularly difficult because it is sensitive to the spatial-temporal characteristics of rainfall, topography of the terrain and surface flow processes influenced by buildings and other man-made features.

“CityCat” is an urban flood modelling, analysis and visualisation tool which uses very accurate and computationally efficient solutions for free surface flow equations. In this pilot project a Cloud Computing compatible version of “CityCat” was developed and for the first time applied for estimating spatial and temporal flood risk at a city-scale.

The use of Cloud Computing enabled modelling of flooding of larger domains (up to 1100km2) with much higher resolution (up to 16.000.000 computational cells) than has been done previously.

This project has demonstrated that the use of Cloud Computing can enable efficient and detailed modelling of flooding at a city or even regional scale, with high resolution, using standard terrain and rainfall data and Cloud enabled software which does not impose limitations on the computational domain size.