For more than 50 years flood modelling has underpinned the development of flood risk management solutions. From its initial use in the design of flood defences, flood modelling is now a key element of most flood risk management responses. Jacobs’ Flood Modeller software allow users to seamlessly model rivers, floodplains and urban drainage systems.
In Ireland, Flood Modeller is used by the Office of Public Works (OPW) for the development of flood relief schemes as part of the national Catchment Flood Risk Assessment and Management (CFRAM) programme. Flood Modeller has been used to undertake CFRAM studies of the Suir and Shannon catchments.
It was also used in the Fingal and east Meath region for a Flood Risk Assessment and Management Study which focused on urban areas known to have experienced flooding in the past and areas subject to significant development pressure both now and in the future.
Flood Modeller is used in many other projects in Ireland including the Dublin MetroLink project for which the National Transport Authority commissioned Jacobs to provide engineering design services.
Available for free, Flood Modeller’s 1D and 2D solvers provide a flexible and cost-effective range of tools for proactive decision-making to help manage our environment and the challenges of flood risk.
It is suitable for numerous engineering and environmental applications, from calculating simple backwater profiles to modelling entire catchments to mapping potential flood risk for entire countries.
Flood Modeller training courses in Ireland next take place in September 2019 in Dublin for those who want to build on their existing skill set or wish to realise the full potential of Flood Modeller.
With the growing demand for more detailed analysis, which may require thousands of simulations that take several hours or even days to complete, there is a need for more computational resources and the specialist software licenses needed to undertake the analysis.
To address this, Jacobs have developed Flood Cloud, a highly effective, simple-to-use, and cost-effective solution available to anyone wanting to undertake flood risk modelling.
It provides the platform to create a step change in the way we understand and interpret our modelling possibilities by offering the opportunity to run simulations in the cloud, at a fraction of the time.
The pay-as-you-go service enables clients with growing or fluctuating project demands to rapidly scale up/down their processing capacity. It also allows clients to cut out the initial cost of software as well as the ongoing maintenance of high-performance hardware.
Flood Cloud enables models built using Flood Modeller to be run concurrently in the cloud. It also integrates with third-party flood modelling software such as TUFLOW and HEC-RAS.
By providing clients with the opportunity to select and run their preferred model(s), it enables them to utilise the most appropriate tool for each modelling application and to embrace the challenges of the Big Data environment while delivering a more informed understanding of flooding.
For more information about our work in Ireland, click here.