Two-dimensional shallow-water model with porosity for urban flood modelling

Floodplains with urban areas have significant effects on inundation flows. Large-scale modelling of such zones thus requires a special treatment to involve those effects. This paper presents a shallow-water model with porosity to account for the reduction in storage and in the exchange sections due to presence of buildings and other structures on the floodplains. The introduction of the porosity in the shallow-water equations modifies the expressions for the fluxes and source terms. Furthermore, it implies the addition of a specific source term. The equations are solved by means of a finite-volume scheme with a modified HLLC Riemann solver and upwind treatment of the source terms. The possibilities of the proposed approach are demonstrated by an application to a large-scale experiment that was part of the European IMPACT project, which represents the severe flooding of the Italian Toce valley. This demonstrates the key advantage of the method, as it allows an accurate representation of the flow without detailed meshing of the urbanized area.