Enhancing the resilience to flooding induced by levee breaches in lowland areas: A methodology based on numerical modelling

With the aim of improving resilience to flooding and increasing preparedness to face levee-breach-induced inundations, this paper presents a methodology for creating a wide database of numerically simulated flooding scenarios due to embankment failures, applicable to any lowland area protected by river levees. The analysis of the detailed spatial and temporal flood data obtained from these hypothetical scenarios is expected to contribute both to the development of civil protection planning and to immediate actions during a possible future flood event (comparable to one of the available simulations in the database) for which real-time modelling may not be feasible. The most relevant criteria concerning the choice of mathematical model, grid resolution, hydrological conditions, breach parameters and locations are discussed in detail. The proposed methodology, named RESILIENCE, is applied to a 1100 km 2 pilot area in northern Italy. The creation of a wide database for the study area is made possible thanks to the adoption of a GPU-accelerated shallow-water numerical model which guarantees remarkable computational efficiency (ratios of physical to computational time up to 80) even for high-resolution meshes (2.5-5 m) and very large domains (>1000 km2).