Update 0.11
Jun 26, 2023 • Bastian van den Bout
We have just launched the new update for the fastflood.org tool. There are quite a lot of new features, including FastFlood Pro. To give a short overview, the general updates are
- Culverts
- Import/Generate/Export channel as vector features, and edit channel routes in the model
- Bug fixes to the runfile and various model settings combinations that would prevent the model to run
What we are more enthausiastic about is the new FastFlood Pro feature, which includes
- Improved elevation data (Copernicus 30m global, and AHN 5m Dutch national elevation). We aim to add the US NED10 model as well in the near future.
- Automatic downloading of design storm rainfall events, where you can choose duration and return period
- Visualization of Intensity-Duration-Frequency graphs and General Extreme Value curves for the selected study area
- Improvements to the automatic calibration
- Forecasting tool that can be used to automatically load soil moisture estimates from sattelite data and global weather forecasts.
The forecasting tool also allows users to select and auto-download historic events. We plan to extend the historic record to include the past years in the near future. Do be carefull with the automatic forecasting tool. Its purpose is currently to help with calibration, validation, and scenario exploration. You can NOT use this as an early-warning system out of the box. If you wish to make an operational version of fastflood for real-time early warning, please contact us to discuss how this might be set up in a more robust way.
At the moment, FastFlood pro will be available for 35 euro/month. This helps us cover the technological costs (hosting for the pre-processed data is costly due to the size of global datasets) and support the further development of the tool. To clarify, the improved data that is provided is available in raw form from the institutions that developed them. If you prefer to process the data yourself this is very well possible. See www.lisemmodel.com for more resources on how we typically do this. With FastFlood Pro, you gain access to easy-to-use, pre-processed versions of this datasets.
We are dedicated to maintain full functionality for free users. All model setups can be fully simulated using the free version.
With these additions, we believe fastflood has grown from its early days to become a full-fletched
- Superfast flood model
- Rapid sketching and mitigation tool and we believe it can be of incredible use to flood modellers and descision makers.
There are some plans to add additional features, such as automatically-available climate scenarios. However, we will focus more on training material and example use-cases in order to ensure people have resources to correctly deploy the model.
So, the new website is online, and one thing that came up was the availability of older versions of the website. Some users might be using and relying on consistent output from a version of the model. For this reason, we will support previous versions as well. For now, you can find an older version of the website here:
Good luck with your modelling efforts,
Bastian van den Bout