Ballater Flood 2016

Following Storm Frank which arrived on Hogmanay 2016 the town of Ballater suffered an extreme flooding event when the river Dee burst it's banks:

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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-46638329

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The current lack of resources in governmental agencies means that studies such as the Ballater case presented here can make a contribution to flood mitigation

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50393617

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MTS have applied an open-source flooding model called shallowFoam which shows how the peak river flow rate of 1360 m3/s impacted on the town. Such models can be extremely valuable for understanding the how the flooding process evolves and provide solutions to mitigate against future flooding events. Details of the methodology used in this project can be found here.

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The background map serves as a guide to the flood location.

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The results show how the wetted area (coloured contours) progresses with time and the start of the flood recession. Additional information on water depth and velocity are available from the model. A reasonable qualitative agreement is observed between the shallowFoam model and the commercial code used in the official flooding report as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Flood prediction using commercial code.