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Hydrodynamic modelling using SFINCS
Year of publication: 2024
Access: The hydrodynamic model SFINCS (Super Fast INundation of CoastS) was developed by Deltares in the Netherlands and is used to simulate compound flooding caused by multiple drivers like precipitation, river discharge and sea level. It is freely available from Deltares via the link below.
Link: https://download.deltares.nl/en/sfincs (download link); https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378383920304828?via%3Dihub (introduction paper)
Organisation(s) / Author(s): Deltares, The Netherlands, Tim Leijnse
Description: The following abstract is taken from the introduction paper by Tim Leijnse et al., 2021. The link to this paper is provided above. SFINCS, a new reduced-physics solver to compute compound flooding in coastal systems due to fluvial, pluvial, tidal, wind- and wave-driven processes in a computationally efficient way, is presented and validated for a number of verification and application cases. The model solves simplified equations of mass and momentum, which are driven by storm surge and wave boundary conditions, precipitation rates and upstream river discharges. It includes spatially-varying infiltration and bed roughness terms as well as an absorbing-generating seaward boundary to enable wave-driven flooding. Furthermore, advection and wind stress terms can be included. We demonstrate for the application case of hurricane impact on Jacksonville (Florida, USA) that the observed flooding was a combination of fluvial, pluvial, tidal and wind-driven flooding and that this can be modeled well using the reduced-physics solver. We show that the addition of an advection term to the momentum equations is necessary to model shock flows such as dam breaks but also incident broken waves. Thus, wave-driven flooding can be modeled with high computational efficiency and adequate accuracy as demonstrated for the case of Hernani (the Philippines). The model results show the potential of achieving good accuracy at limited computational expense.
Technical considerations:
SFINCS can either be run on your local computer or a linux based cluster using batch files. The model is setup using geospatial data on elevation, bathymetry, land cover (to derive the surface roughness), infiltration and hydrodynamic forcings like precipitation, discharge and sea level. An easy to use and well documented way of setting up SFINCS models is to use the Python environment hydromt-sfincs (https://deltares.github.io/hydromt_sfincs/latest/). This python environment has been developed by Dirk Eilander (Deltares, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and is first described in the following publication (https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/23/823/2023/).
Keywords:
hydrodynamic model, compound flooding, river flooding, coastal flooding, compound risks