Experimental and numerical study of flood in a river-network-floodplain set-up

This paper describes the experiments carried out on flood hydrodynamics in a river-network-floodplain set-up for validating numerical models. Fluvial floods in the set-up are generated due to overbank flow. The flood extent is extracted by processing overlapping images of the flooded set-up. The steady-state flow depths and velocities are measured by a point gauge and acoustic Doppler velocimeter (ADV), respectively. The surface velocities are estimated using large scale particle image velocimetry (LSPIV). The details of these measurements, flood hydrodynamics and datasets collected in the experiments are presented and analysed. Two numerical models of varying complexities are applied to reproduce the experimental events. The comparisons of numerical and experimental results on the different aspects of floods highlight the importance of the observed datasets. The complete flood datasets may be used to calibrate flow models, evaluate drying-wetting and model coupling algorithms. The datasets are freely available for academic purpose.