A Mixed Grid, GPU Based, Non-linear Shallow Water Solver for Riverine, Tsunami, and Storm Surge Flood Hydrodynamic Simulations

This paper describes a fast non-linear shallow water (NSW) solver on a grid comprising of cells of various shapes. The NSW model is solved using a positivity preserving, finite volume based shock capturing algorithm. Temporal calculations use the TVD (Total Variation Diminishing) 2^nd order Runge-Kutta explicit scheme. The solver accurately preserves the steady “C” state of the NSW model. The NSW solver is implemented on the GPGPUs (General-Purpose computing on Graphical Processing Units) using Nvidia’s CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) programming library. The model has been successfully verified and validated against analytical, experimental and field cases. The model can be used for tsunami simulations on telescoping grids, fluvial and pluvial floods, storm surge inundations and dam break flooding with a variety of mixed shape grids.