Flood Forecasting Using Two Dimentional Model: The Case of Karkheh River Basin in Iran

Iran has been hit by three major waves of rain and flooding over the course of two weeks which led to flooding in at least 26 of Iran s 31 provinces and at least 70 people died nationwide as of 6 April 2019, according to the officials. the cost of damage from widespread floods in Iran was 1.5$ billion. Because of the cloudy skies, remote sensing observations are limited to some areas and few days. Thus, there is huge uncertainty about characteristics of flood events and possible consequences. the flood management requires basically a better knowledge of the phenomenon (flood), and the use of predictive methods. In order to limit this risk, we became interested in hydrodynamics modeling of Kharkheh river. Due to the complex behavior of the rivers during floods computer modeling is the most efficient tool with the least possible cost to studyand simulate the behavior of the rivers. Two-dimensional (2D) numerical simulation proved to be an important tool for understanding flood events. The present study applied the new HEC-RAS-v5.07 to simulate the March 2019 flood event in the Karkheh river at Khuzestan province. The flood simulated shows good performance when compared with satellite image of the flood event. In addition, the simulation provides information like water depth, flow velocity and a temporal variation of the flood.

Keywords:

Flood , Numerical Modeling , Karkheh River , Dam