Papers

@article{cea_implementation_2024,

title = {Implementation of a GPU-enhanced multiclass soil erosion model based on the 2D shallow water equations in the software Iber},

author = {Luis Cea-Gómez and Orlando García-Feal and Guillaume Nord and Guillaume Piton and Cédric Legoût},

url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364815224001592},

doi = {10.1016/j.envsoft.2024.106098},

issn = {1364-8152},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-08-01},

urldate = {2026-04-21},

journal = {Environmental Modelling & Software},

volume = {179},

pages = {106098},

abstract = {We present the implementation of a new fully distributed multiclass soil erosion module. The model is based on a 2D finite volume solver (Iber+) for the 2D shallow water equations that computes the overland flow water depths and velocities. From these, the model evaluates the transport of sediment particles due to bed load and suspended load, including rainfall-driven and runoff-driven erosion processes, and using well-established physically-based formulations. The evolution of the mass of sediment particles in the soil layer is computed from a mass conservation equation for each sediment class. The solver is implemented using High Performance Computing techniques that take advantage of the computational capabilities of standard Graphical Processing Units, achieving speed-ups of two orders of magnitude relative to a sequential implementation on the CPU. We show the application and validation of the model at different spatial scales, ranging from laboratory experiments to meso-scale catchments.},

keywords = {Distributed numerical modelling, High performance computing, Sediment transport, shallow water equations, Soil erosion},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{farfan-duran_surrogate-assisted_2024,

title = {Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Algorithm for the Calibration of Distributed Hydrological Models Based on Two-Dimensional Shallow Water Equations},

author = {Juan F. Farfán-Durán and Arash Heidari and Tom Dhaene and Ivo Couckuyt and Luis Cea-Gómez},

url = {https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/16/5/652},

doi = {10.3390/w16050652},

issn = {2073-4441},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-01-01},

urldate = {2026-04-20},

journal = {Water},

volume = {16},

number = {5},

pages = {652},

publisher = {Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute},

abstract = {Distributed hydrological models based on shallow water equations have gained popularity in recent years for the simulation of storm events, due to their robust and physically based routing of surface runoff through the whole catchment, including hill slopes and water streams. However, significant challenges arise in their calibration due to their relatively high computational cost and the extensive parameter space. This study presents a surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithm (SA-EA) for the calibration of a distributed hydrological model based on 2D shallow water equations. A surrogate model is used to reduce the computational cost of the calibration process by creating a simulation of the solution space, while an evolutionary algorithm guides the search for suitable parameter sets within the simulated space. The proposed methodology is evaluated in four rainfall events located in the northwest of Spain: one synthetic storm and three real storms in the Mandeo River basin. The results show that the SA-EA accelerates convergence and obtains superior fit values when compared to a conventional global calibration technique, reducing the execution time by up to six times and achieving between 98% and 100% accuracy in identifying behavioral parameter sets after four generations of the SA-EA. The proposed methodology offers an efficient solution for the calibration of complex hydrological models, delivering improved computational efficiency and robust performance.},

keywords = {evolutionary algorithm, hydrological model, Optimization, shallow water equations, Surrogate model},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{prieto-arranz_well-balanced_2021,

title = {A Well-Balanced SPH-ALE Scheme for Shallow Water Applications},

author = {Alberto Prieto-Arranz and Luis Ramírez-Palacios and Iván Couceiro-Aguiar and Ignasi Colominas-Ezponda and Xesús Nogueira-Garea},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s10915-021-01600-1},

doi = {10.1007/s10915-021-01600-1},

issn = {1573-7691},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-08-01},

urldate = {2026-08-07},

journal = {Journal of Scientific Computing},

volume = {88},

number = {3},

pages = {84},

abstract = {In this work, a new discretization of the source term of the shallow water equations with non-flat bottom geometry is proposed to obtain a well-balanced scheme. A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation based on Riemann solvers is presented to solve the SWE. Moving-Least Squares approximations are used to compute high-order reconstructions of the numerical fluxes and, stability is achieved using the a posteriori MOOD paradigm. Several benchmark 1D and 2D numerical problems are considered to test and validate the properties and behavior of the presented schemes.},

keywords = {moving least squares, shallow water equations, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, SPH-ALE, Well-balanced methods},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{garcia-feal_accelerated_2018,

title = {An Accelerated Tool for Flood Modelling Based on Iber},

author = {Orlando García-Feal and José González-Cao and Moncho Gómez-Gesteira and Luis Cea-Gómez and José Manuel Domínguez and Arno Formella},

url = {https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/10/10/1459},

doi = {10.3390/w10101459},

issn = {2073-4441},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-10-01},

urldate = {2026-08-04},

journal = {Water},

volume = {10},

number = {10},

pages = {1459},

publisher = {Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute},

abstract = {This paper presents Iber+, a new parallel code based on the numerical model Iber for two-dimensional (2D) flood inundation modelling. The new implementation, which is coded in C++ and takes advantage of the parallelization functionalities both on CPUs (central processing units) and GPUs (graphics processing units), was validated using different benchmark cases and compared, in terms of numerical output and computational efficiency, with other well-known hydraulic software packages. Depending on the complexity of the specific test case, the new parallel implementation can achieve speedups up to two orders of magnitude when compared with the standard version. The speedup is especially remarkable for the GPU parallelization that uses Nvidia CUDA (compute unified device architecture). The efficiency is as good as the one provided by some of the most popular hydraulic models. We also present the application of Iber+ to model an extreme flash flood that took place in the Spanish Pyrenees in October 2012. The new implementation was used to simulate 24 h of real time in roughly eight minutes of computing time, while the standard version needed more than 15 h. This huge improvement in computational efficiency opens up the possibility of using the code for real-time forecasting of flood events in early-warning systems, in order to help decision making under hazardous events that need a fast intervention to deploy countermeasures.},

keywords = {Benchmark, CUDA, Finite volume, flood, Iber+, numerical simulation, OpenMP, shallow water equations},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}