Fleeing Flood Waters

Floods are among the costliest, frequently reoccurring, and man-made “natural” disaster that affects millions of people worldwide. Despite recent advances in rainfall monitoring through improved satellite remote sensing techniques, there has not been useful enhancements in inundation prediction because of the large computational cost involved in modelling the complex 2D and 3D flood flow processes.

Computationally efficient yet reliable flood models are of great demand so as to have detailed analysis of flood extents over large floodplain areas, resulting in lead times

of 2~3 days helpful in disaster management and recovery. Crucial datasets including high spatial resolution topographic information and efficient mapping of river reach

geometry are not only laborious and expensive, but also absent in the case of many river systems in India. Hence, by employing a model that can extracts useful information from available global Digital Elevation Models (DEM) and which iterates over various reasonable assumptions on rainfall observations, river flow velocity, and terrain morphology, the underlying flood transport processes were carried out reliably in a short duration.