Forecasting floods with unprecedented detail

Flood forecasting with the open-source flood modelling tool High-Performance Integrated Hydrodynamic Modelling System (HiPIMS)

High-Performance Integrated Hydrodynamic Modelling System (HiPIMS) for flood forecasting and risk assessment

1 School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, Loughborough University, United Kingdom

Professor Qiuhua Liang and his team at Loughborough University developed the award-winning High-Performance Integrated Hydrodynamic Modelling System (HiPIMS) over 2 decades. HiPIMS is an open-source flood modelling tool formally released at presentation in 2013. It was designed to better predict and understand flooding using high-performance computing. HiPIMS provides timely and detailed flood forecasts over an entire catchment or city.

The research filled a practical gap – forecasting highly transient flooding processes, driven by intense rainfall, dam breaks, storm surge or tsunamis. Flood predictions or forecasts are essential to assess and mitigate flood risk, and to develop effective plans for emergency response benefiting people at risk, government agencies, and other practitioners working on flood risk management (Xia, Liang and others, 2019).

HiPIMS was implemented and tested for forecasting the flooding process caused by the 2015 Storm Desmond over the entire Eden Catchment of 2500km². The real-time flood forecasting system was developed by integrating HiPIMS with the Met Office’s numerical weather prediction outputs. The system was able to forecast flooding from 36‐hour weather forecasts at a 10-metre resolution in 1.75 hours. This was the first real-time forecasting of a complete flooding process induced by intense rainfall, from rainfall-runoff, river hydraulics to inundation (Ming, Liang and others, 2020).