Two-dimensional modeling of floods to map risk-prone areas

The assessment of flood risk is a difficult task and usually requires solution of a flood routing problem as a part of the assessment. Due to the large number of scenarios that have to be developed and analyzed, simplified numerical models are used for the computation of flooded areas in each scenario. More sophisticated models are often too complex to manage or, due to their design generality, not well suited to deal with the specific needs of flood routing problems. A comparison among three different models, with varying degrees of simplification and abstraction, is presented and discussed. Some considerations on the effectiveness of simpler models are drawn, focusing on the prediction of flooded areas.