Po river morphodynamics modelled with the open-source code iRIC

Abstract

The paper presents the numerical modelling of the hydro-morphological evolution of a 10 km reach of the Po River in Italy. The simulation is performed with the freeware code iRIC, recently developed by an international community of scientists and practitioners. Starting from a non-detailed description of the studied area and using synthetic data, the reach has been modelled adopting a 2-D solver. Based on a Digital Elevation Model of the area, the domain is discretized by an unstructured grid with triangular meshes. First results show a promising capability of the model in reproducing the behaviour of the reach, both in terms of liquid flow and morphodynamics, if compared with historical data measured along the watercourse and reported in literature. In the future, additional simulations will be performed, enlarging the studied area and using detailed input data measured with traditional and innovative techniques.