Mexico – Hydraulic Model Development

Mexico’s Rio Panuco River drains to the Gulf of Mexico, but its lower reaches pass through a flat, wide floodplain, which is subject to frequent flooding, affecting both agricultural and developed areas. A hydraulic model was critically needed to represent the flow regime and to provide inputs to a flood inundation mapping procedure.

As part of an overall Rio Panuco river forecast system, Riverside Technology, inc. (RTi) worked with the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) and Mexico’s Comision Nacional del Agua (CNA) to develop a hydraulic model for the lower reaches and tributaries of the Rio Panuco. A previous hydraulic analysis had been conducted by Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE); consequently RTi worked closely with CFE to obtain river cross-section data, storage characteristics of lagoons, and topological relationships between river reaches, levees, and storage lagoons. In addition, RTi engineers made field visits to the lower Rio Panuco area and reviewed conditions and connections between the various hydraulic elements of the river system. Local CNA staff provided detailed descriptions of these hydraulic elements and their purpose and history. Significant storage capacity is available during large floods in a number of lagoons and storage ponds, which are activated by the overtopping of levees. Although some agricultural land is damaged in this process, populated areas are preserved by accessing this storage and reducing peak flows.

RTi compiled this information and formatted it for use in the NWS FLDWAV dynamic routing model, which includes the ability to simulate unsteady flow in a mainstem river and its tributaries and can account for diversions due to levee overtopping. Some simplifications were made to improve model stability. The final model is now incorporated into the real-time flood-forecasting system. The hydrologic forecast simulation produces the inflow hydrographs for the upstream boundaries of the mainstem and its tributaries in the hydraulic model. The downstream boundary condition for the model is the sea level at the Gulf of Mexico. The connection between the hydrologic and hydraulic model components is handled automatically within the forecast system and its databases, based on parameters defined during system initialization.

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