Building a Digital Flood Twin of Tasmania

BUILDING A DIGITAL

FLOOD TWIN OF TASMANIA

The devastating 2016 floods in Tasmania claimed lives, caused hundreds of millions of dollars in recovery and reconstruction costs, and changed landforms and river courses forever. Following this event, the Tasmanian Government started a project to improve strategic flooding intelligence for a better understanding of flood risks.

The Tasmanian Flood Map Project, supported by the expertise of WMAwater, SES Tasmania, Indicium Dynamics and Innovyze, was established to develop a digital twin of Tasmania to model current and future flood events and develop the tools to provide intelligence to emergency managers and responders.

Once completed, the project will allow for better community protection planning, land use planning, building tools, community responses, and support the effective investments in recovery – which will increase community resilience during future flood events. This project is a partnership between the Australian and Tasmanian Governments.

EXTENSIVE DATA COLLECTION

Project work includes the improvement of base information for the digital twin, establishment of the strategic modelling environment, production of 0.5 per cent, one per cent and two per cent Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP), a flood history of Tasmania for the 16 most significant recorded flood events, strategic flood maps and detailed flood studies of the most vulnerable locations; in which no contemporary flood studies are available.

A significant output delivered in the project is the development of a composite Digital Terrain Model (DTM) covering all of Tasmania. This involved the collection of over 12,000 square kilometres of new LiDAR data in less than a year. Drone based LiDAR collection for specific areas, merged with existing LiDAR acquisitions collected over the last 12 years, provided an information base of more than 175 LiDAR acquisitions and existing photogrammetric contours, to form two new products, including a ten metre and a two metre Digital Terrain Model for the entire Tasmanian land mass.

COLLABORATION BETWEEN INDUSTRY EXPERTS

The digital flood twin is being developed by WMAwater with support from SES Tasmania, Indicium Dynamics and Innovyze using the Innovyze InfoWorks ICM platform. The decision behind the selection of InfoWorks ICM was the platform’s powerful modelling and data management tools, user-friendly interface and ability to go ‘live’ as the SES develops its capacity. The project’s very large datasets can be easily managed, versioned, updated and maintained over time using the master database system.

WMAwater is a national leader in flood modelling and management. Its technical expertise has been engaged to develop the modelling methodology and all hydrologic and hydrodynamic model outputs. Rather than delivering a static flood map output that would date quickly, the project methodology has been developed so the model input data can be updated as the land profile and asset data changes – preparing the region for a future flood forecasting tool that can be used in real-time with the latest data.

Indicium Dynamics has significant experience in cloud computing, development, installation, and management of real-time data collection in the field, to complement feeds from the Bureau of Meteorology to support the evolution into forecasting projects. It is providing the IT infrastructure and platform support for the project, including setting up automated software deployment and upgrades for improved system management and disaster recovery.

The project continues to raise awareness of flood risk in the state of Tasmania and the benefits of the study will provide support to the community and their wellbeing during future flooding disasters.