A 2D shallow flow model for practical dam-break simulations

Dam-break flows usually occur in domains with complex geometric and topographic features and involve abrupt flow patterns. A dam-break model must therefore be able to effectively handle different flow types including transcritical flows or hydraulic jumps, deal with complex domain topography, capture repeating wet-dry interface and represent high roughness values in the floodplain. Herein, all of these objectives are achieved by extending a recent one-dimensional finite volume Godunov-type model into two dimensions for solving the shallow-water equations. While doing so, a much simplified condition to maintain well-balanced solutions around a wet-dry front is proposed and a two-dimensional friction source term discretization is derived under a suitable stability condition in relation to practical simulations. The two-dimensional model is successfully validated against three analytical benchmark tests and then assessed for predicting realistic dam-break flood events.