A GPU Implementation for Two-Dimensional Shallow Water Modeling

Two dimensional water flow simulations are useful for engineering firms to model floods, river/reservoir behavior, and dam break scenarios. These models allow us to estimate the consequences of such events, which can determine the allocation of funds towards high-risk areas. Much of the work in flood modeling still uses one-dimensional solutions, which model the river as a series of cross-sectional slices spanning the entire breadth of the river. At each computational slice, they simulate water elevation and velocity based on the nearby upstream and downstream slices. The advantage of 1D solutions is that they vastly simplify the computational difficulty of the problem. However, they only model velocity in one direction per cross-sectional slice. This method works well for large, steady rivers with low lateral velocity, but