HAIL-CAESAR

This is the development version of the HAIL-CAESAR surface flooding model.

The High-performance Architecture Independent LISFLOOD-CAESAR model

HAIL-CAESAR is a hydrodynamic, landscape evolution, cellular automaton model. In other words, it simulates the movement of water and erosion of sediment in a river catchment, for the purposes of investigating flood-inundation, sediment transport and catchment evolution over a range of timescales from hours to thousands of years. (And potentially longer if you are really patient enough...)

The development of HAIL-CAESAR is led by Declan Valters (@dvalters), at the British Geological Survey (@BritGeoSurvey). Over the years model development has been supported by funding from a NERC PhD Studentship, ARCHER eCSE funding awards, other NERC grants, in particular via the Edinburgh Land Surface Dynamics Group (@LSDTopoTools) at Edinburgh University, and the University of Manchester.

The model is derived from the CAESAR-Lisflood model, which is a C#/.NET Windows-based implementation of the model, with a very useful GUI. You may find much of the documentation and discussion for CAESAR-Lisflood relevant for using HAIL-CAESAR, but remember there are small differences at present, so treat the documentation here as the canonical source.

HAIL-CAESAR doesn't have a GUI - the model is run from scripts or from typing commands at the command line/terminal. The model runs and writes output directly to files on disk. You then have to process these output files yourself to view the model output subsequently.

LSDMappingTools is a good package for visualising the output and producing research-quality figures from HAIL-CAESAR. GIS programs, such as the excellent QGIS are also useful.

Documentation can be found here.

Why is it called HAIL-CAESAR?

Historical interlude...

The original CAESAR Model stood for Cellular Automaton Evolutionary Slope and River model. It was developed by Tom Coulthard and was originally written in the C programming language. Later it was ported to the C# programming language and developed a GUI and you can watch the flood simulation update in real time on screen. Later still (2013), it was coupled with a flood inundation model, LISFLOOD-FP, which replaced the existing non-hydrodynamic flow routing model in CAESAR. In 2014-2016, it was translated into C++ to facilitate an OpenMP parallelisation of the model, so that it could be compiled and run on different computing services such as clusters and HPC, which are usually linux-based. I called it the High Performance Architecture Independent Lisflood CAESAR model, because everybody loves a good project acronym...