Iber as a tool to analyse flooding scenarios

Abstract: Floods are one of the most dangerous extreme events that can affect people and properties. These events have intensified worldwide over the last decades due to climate change. Therefore, the capability to predict and analyse, in a quick and accurate way, the effects of these floods is of crucial importance to avoid or minimize the hazards associated to them. This task can be accomplished by means of numerical tools as Iber. Iber is a 2-D numerical model, developed by GEAMA (Universidade da Coruña) and Flumen (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), that uses the finite volume technique to solve the 2-D Shallow Water Equations in order to obtain the water depth and velocity components of the flow under different scenarios. To assess the capabilities of Iber  a series of test cases have been reproduced following the document “Benchmarking the latest generation of 2D hydraulic modelling packages” published by the non-departmental public body Environment Agency of the U.K. Government. The results show that Iber is a suitable tool to reproduce accurately different flooding scenarios. A new implementation of the model has been developed by EPHYSLAB. This implementation takes advantage of the modern hardware capabilities and provides significant speedups over the original code. The new possibilities offered by a faster code will be studied.