Influence of Topographic Characteristics on the Adaptive Time Interval for Diffusion Wave Simulation

Abstract

Frequent flash floods in recent years have resulted in a major impact on the living environment, urban planning, economic system and flood control facilities of residents around the world; therefore, the establishment of disaster management and flood warning systems is an urgent task, required for government units to propose flood mitigation measures. To conserve the numerical accuracy and maintain stability for explicit scheme, the Courant–Friedrich–Lewy (CFL) condition is necessarily enforced, and it is conducted to regulate the relation between the numerical marching speed and wave celerity. On the other hand, to avoid the problem of flow reflux between adjacent grids in executing 2D floodplain simulation, another restriction on time intervals, known as the Hunter condition, was devised in an earlier study. The objective of this study was to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of these two time-interval restrictions during runoff simulations. Via a case study of the Komarovsky River Basin in Russia, the results show that at the beginning of a storm, the computational time interval is restricted by the CFL condition along the upstream steep hillsides, and the time interval is subject to the Hunter condition in the mainstream during the occurrence of the main storm. The reason of a reduction in computational efficiency, which is a common problem in conducting distributed routing, was clearly explained. To relax the time-interval restrictions for efficient flood forecasting, the research findings also indicate the importance of integrating modified hydrological models proposed in recent studies.