Near real-time coastal flood inundation simulation with uncertainty analysis and GPU acceleration in a web environment

A proof of concept is presented on how to produce uncertainty-aware near real-time coastal flood inundation Web maps from water-level observations and predictions, which have been computed for tide gauge sites and made publicly accessible. The stochastic inundation simulation takes into account several sources of uncertainty, which have until now not been employed in either bathtub models or hydrodynamic models. The simulation is based on the Monte Carlo method. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated by an implementation using general-purpose computing on graphics processing units. The outcome of the research is that the current technologies enable the building of a novel system that connects to official data sources and that takes into account sources of uncertainty whose inclusion in the past has been avoided by being either weakly known or computationally too expensive.