A Methodology Based on Numerical Simulation to Study River Floods. Application to Lower River Omaña Basin

Abstract

The river floods happening in populated areas are serious natural risks that give rise to human and economic losses. In order to predict the consequences of river floods and to implement preventive and corrective measures, the mathematical modelling and numerical simulation play, nowadays, a very important role. Among the wide variety of software available for the numerical simulation in fluvial dynamics we have used, in this work, the hydrodynamic model IBER, which is free access simulation software for solving 2D shallow water models. In this paper we focus our attention in floods happening in the vicinity of the confluence of two rivers where there are also crops, with economic importance for the inhabitants of the area that may be affected by the inundation. As an example of this type of geographical region we have used data obtained from the region Las Omañas in NW Spain where, although there is the confluence of rivers Luna and Omaña, the confluence region does not belong to the study area, since we pay our attention to the inundations happening in the village Las Omañas, which is due to the action of one of both rivers, namely the river Omaña.