Current trends in the optimization of hydraulic flood simulations in ungauged steep rivers

The numerical tools simulating flood events must be accurate, in order to provide useful data, and computationally efficient, to facilitate informed decision-making during a flood. One of the main limitations of modelling software at the present time is the CPU time needed to perform simulations over complex spatial domains. Recent studies show that the models lack the necessary implementations to take advantage of the parallelism available on current hardware, which hinders their use in interesting applications such as real-time flood forecasting, calibration and uncertainty analysis, or visualization and gamification of floods for improved risk communication. For instance, methods based on artificial intelligence have contributed highly to the state-of-the-art of flood simulations, providing better performance and cost-effective solutions than complex hydrodynamic fluid solvers. The current study provides an overview of strategies dedicated to the optimization of hydraulic flood simulations suitable for ungauged steep rivers, which are not extensively studied.