Best of BMT - Mapping Floods with Confidence

Floods, storms and coastal surges cause extensive damage, loss of life and disruption, but to fully understand and manage the risks involved takes software that can accurately model the inundation of rivers, urban areas and coastal floodplains.

Queensland’s Ipswich City Council was faced with precisely that problem – they needed a major overhaul of their flood models and maps at a high resolution and across a large area, but there simply wasn’t any single modelling software that was up to the task. While the old solution would have entailed running multiple separate models and then combining the results, that was an inefficient process which invariably introduces its own issues.

Thankfully we were on hand to help with TUFLOW HPC in one of the first applications of its kind for a catchment scale study. Now established as a world-leading numerical model, our innovative in-house flood, urban stormwater and coastal simulation software is the benchmark modelling tool for supporting floodplain management. It provided accurate modelling across a large area and at a high resolution, vastly improving the Council’s flood mapping and providing critical information that will assist flood disaster management and future planning.

This was the first catchment scale model to realise the benefits of TUFLOW HPC and it meant that a single model could be developed, giving Ipswich a clearer picture of how to better plan and respond to one of nature’s most destructive events and help save lives in the process.

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This article is part of #BestOfBMT 2019, featuring our best projects throughout the year.