Simulation of the flood event on the Secchia river in January 2014

In this work the flood event that occurred on the Secchia river in January 2014 was simulated using a numerical code developed internally, in which the formation of a breach in the right bank caused the flooding of several hundred square km in the province of Modena. . Thanks to the ability of the computational code to exploit the computational power of the GPU cards, it was possible to create an integrated and two-dimensional model of the river course and the territory potentially affected by flooding, solving the equations at low water in complete form.

The simulation was conducted on a domain of 180 square km, adopting a Cartesian grid composed of over 7 million elements with a 5 m side. In this way it was possible to accurately describe all the topographical elements that significantly affect the evolution of the flooding, such as road and rail embankments and the embankments of the minor hydrographic network. The simulation was validated by comparing the results with various data collected in the field, including a high resolution satellite image of the SAR type.

Thanks to the computational capabilities of the model, and the robustness of the algorithm used, the ratio between the simulation time and the physical time is equal to 1/15.

The remarkable calculation speed and the high accuracy of the model make it possible to use it both to define off-line flood scenarios and (if coupled with real-time forecast models) to create real-time simulations of flooding and propagation of full.