Core+ DynamicFlood – Introduction

You can run hydrodynamic 2-dimensional surface flow simulations from SCALGO Live using Core+ DynamicFlood. You can initiate a simulation from a workspace, and the results are delivered as a modelspace where you can easily explore, download and share the output.

Note that we have not yet released the add-on module in all countries, please contact us if you have questions about availability.

Initiating a hydrodynamic simulation

When you want to run a hydrodynamic 2D simulation of surface water flows in a workspace, you go to the pane “More” in the workspace toolbox and press “Run hydrodynamic engine…”

Find the "run hydrodynamic engine" option in the "More" tap of the workspace dialog.

This opens a new window with options regarding the rain input to the simulation. By clicking the eye icon over each rain event, information is shown in a side video, where the rain event can be edited and saved as a new rain event on the workspace.

You can add your own rain events through the “+” icon next to the list of rain events. In some countries, clicking the “+” icon will also allow you to switch the default rain events over to those belonging to another nearby region. Your organization administrator can configure a different set of default rain events that replace the ones provided by SCALGO.


Information for the 5-year return period event.

Furthermore, by clicking on the cogwheel, you can specify the simulation's resolution as well as the length of the time step for saving results (this does not influence the simulation time step) and the total length of the simulation.

By default, the simulation will run in the same resolution as the workspace, but it is possible to select a coarser resolution. The full-resolution elevation data is still used to a certain degree in the model thanks to TUFLOW's Sub-Grid Sampling feature, but the simulation will happen on a coarser grid, which greatly speeds up the simulation. The TUFLOW manual contains more information about Sub-Grid Sampling (SGS) in Section 7.4.3. The modelspace contains the elevation layer and output layers in the selected resolution.

Simulation configuration options.

Progress information

While DynamicFlood computations are running, a single progress bar is shown to indicate how far the currently-running computation has progressed, and the progress bar can be expanded to view the queue of simulations currently waiting to run in your organization.

Note that your hydrodynamic computations take a great deal longer than regular workspace computations and that other users in your organization might be using all your available GPU/TUFLOW resources in SCALGO Live. In such case, your job will be automatically queued and started when the resources become available. If you want to cancel the running command, you can do that from this progress bar. Note that you can only cancel jobs started by yourself.

When you expand the progress bar, the status of individual rain events that are being simulated is shown. The queue shows both your own and your colleagues' simulations, each showing the name of the workspace, the model's resolution and area, and the number of rain events in the simulation. If your organization has a shared GPU license, your job may be queued while a user in another organization is running. In this case, the queue merely displays a placeholder indicating this situation and does not display any details of the other organization’s simulation.

Two GPU jobs are queued, using the same GPU/TUFLOW license. If other users had started hydrodynamic computations you would be able to see them in this list as well.

For your own simulations, you can move the mouse cursor over each rain event to see the current progress in percent, the approximate remaining runtime and whether the current timestep of the model is considered slow or not.

Under normal circumstances, the progress bar is green for each rain event. If the model is slow, meaning that the timesteps are below an acceptable threshold, the progress bar becomes red, giving a quick indication that the model might take longer than expected.

The acceptable threshold to determine if a model is slow, is the model's resolution in metres divided by 20. This means that for a 1-meter resolution simulation, the model is considered to be slow if the timestep goes below 0.05 seconds.

The progress bar is red, indicating that the model’s timestep is considered to be slow.

You can click the rain event's progress bar to bring up the status window, which displays the simulation's current status within that event. The window shows the mass balance, as well as the number of repeated timesteps, which can indicate sudden changes in the model's behavior.

The graph, which shows where in the rain event the simulation is at the moment, can be enriched with additional charts, such as the model's timestep over time and control numbers. There are three different control numbers, Nu, Nc and Nd, that provide insight into various characteristics of the simulations. Expert modellers use these to better understand the factors influencing the model's speed and performance. We refer the mathematically inclined reader to the TUFLOW manual for more information on the three control numbers.

Status window shown when clicking on the progress bar of a single rain event.

Looking at the result

As explained earlier, the result is delivered as a modelspace. The computation processes your rain events one by one, and they will appear in your modelspace as they are finished. Thus you will be able to see the result from some time steps before the full computation is finished.

If you want a deeper understanding of how we setup the hydrodynamic model you can proceed to the next section of this manual.