Type: MSc/BSc
In July 2021, a flash flood in the Eifel region (NRW, RLP, and Belgium), destroyed large parts of settlements, resulting in multiple casualties. As the climate emergency worsens, flash floods of similar magnitude are expected to become more frequent. The computational forecasting of flash floods poses many difficulties, one of which is that streams and regions prone to them are typically much smaller than the river systems which are monitored and modelled. Consequently, flash flood modelling remains a challenge, as large domains need to be highly resolved, for which (i) high-performance computing solvers are warranted and (ii) model setups need to be constructed at a high spatial resolution using as much of the available spatial data as possible.
We seek a student to work on the preparation of a hydraulic/hydrologic model of the Ahr catchment, Germany, (~900 km2) at extremely high resolution (1m2) and performing preliminary simulations on the JUWELS supercomputer at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/ias/jsc/systems/supercomputers/juwels) using the SERGHEI model (https://gitlab.com/serghei-model/serghei).
Responsibilities will include:
- mapping human structures (e.g., bridges, hydraulic structures, bridges) to capture all relevant features and properly account for them in a Digital Elevation Model
- setting up boundaries and instrumenting model output
- setting up a test rainfall event and running preliminary simulations on JUWELS
Desirable skills and interests:
- R/Python programming
- GIS
- interest and/or experience on hydraulic/hydrological modelling and simulation
- minimal Linux knowledge
The student will be jointly supervised at TU Braunschweig and FZ Jülich. A short internship at FZ Jülich during the project work is possible.
Contact: Prof. Ilhan Özgen (i.oezgen(at)tu-braunschweig.de)
Co-supervision: Dr. Daniel Caviedes-Voullième (d.caviedes.voullieme(at)fz-juelich, Jülich Supercomputing Centre)
