Search

South Florida has a complex regional hydrologic system that consists of thousands of miles of networked canals, sloughs, highly pervious aquifers, open areas subjected to overland flow and sheet flow, agricultural areas and rapidly growing urban areas. This region faces equally complex problems related to water supply, flood control, and water quality management. Advanced computational methods and super fast computers alone have limited success in solving modern day problems such as these because the challenge is to model the complexity of the hydrologic system, while maintaining computational efficiency and acceptable levels of numerical errors. A new, physically based hydrologic model for South Florida called the regional simulation model ~RSM! is presented here. The RSM is based on object oriented design methods, advanced computational techniques, extensible markup language, and geographic information system. The RSM uses a finite volume method to simulate two-dimensional~2D! surface and groundwater flow. It is capable of working with unstructured triangular and rectangular mesh discretizations. The discretized control volumes for 2D flow, canal flow and lake flow are treated as abstract "water bodies" that are connected by abstract "water movers." The numerical procedure is designed to work with these and many other abstractions. An object oriented code design is used to provide robust and highly extensible software architecture. A weighted implicit numerical method is used to keep the model fully integrated and stable. A limited error analysis was carried out and the results were compared with analytical error estimates. The paper describes an application of the model to the L-8 basin in South Florida and the strength of this approach in developing models over complex areas.

The weighted implicit finite volume approach for 2-D flow is extended to model canal flow in the South Florida Regional Simulation Model (SFRSM). St Venant equations with the diffusion approximation are used as governing equations. The water body and water mover base classes are used to represent canal segments and junctions in the 1-D model in an object oriented framework. Ground water and surface water flow is integrated with canal flow through flow functions attached to segment walls. The model uses an external sparse solver to solve overland, ground and canal flows simultaneously. The method is stable because of the implicit formulation. This paper describes the theory and provides a sample application.