B-flood 1.0: an open-source Saint-Venant model for flash-flood simulation using adaptive refinement

Abstract

The French Riviera is very often threatened by flash floods. These hydro-meteorological events, which are fast and violent, have catastrophic consequences on life and property. The development of forecasting tools may help to limit the impacts of these extreme events. Our purpose here is to demonstrate the possibility of using b-flood (a subset of the Basilisk library http://basilisk.fr/, last access: 8 November 2021), which is a 2D tool based on the shallow-water equations and adaptive mesh refinement. The code is first validated using analytical test cases describing different flow regimes. It is then applied to the Toce river valley physical model produced by ENEL-HYDRO in the framework of the CADAM project and on a flash-flood case over the urbanized Toce area produced during the IMPACT project. Finally, b-flood is applied to the flash flood of October 2015 in Cannes in south-eastern France, which demonstrates the feasibility of using software based on the shallow-water equations and mesh refinement for flash-flood simulation in small watersheds (less than 100 km2) and on a predictive computational timescale.