ABSTRACT
The numerical modelling of river physical dynamics is of great importance for both process understanding in environmental science and decision support in engineering practice. The continuous gain in computational power and the development of novel numerical algorithms, facilitated the wide application of shallow water models for river flow simulation. Despite the technological and numerical advances, the computational effort required by two-dimensional shallow water river models can still range from days to weeks for, e.g., large-scale simulations or when morphodynamic studies are included. In this context, we developed and implemented the new version 3 of the freeware BASEMENT, a two-dimensional numerical simulation tool, adopting a flexible software framework for different target platforms such as multi-core CPUs or graphics processing units (GPUs). This allows for simulation speedup of a multiple of ten, depending on the problem at hand and the final target platform. Besides the hydrodynamic module, the new software includes a module for morphodynamics accounting for lateral bed slope and curvature effects. We demonstrate the outstanding performance of the software, its robustness and accuracy by hydro- and morphodynamic test cases. The results confirm that BASEMENT could be a useful tool to efficiently simulate complex and long-term river processes on large domains.
