Influence of Time Step Synchronization on Urban Rainfall-Runoff Simulation in a Hybrid CPU/GPU 1D-2D Coupled Model

The 1D sewer - 2D surface coupled hydrodynamic model has increasingly become an essential tool for simulating and predicting the flood process and is widely used in the study of urban rainfall-runoff simulation. The current method of using the smaller time step of the sub model in the coupled model as the synchronization time greatly limits the computational efficiency, especially in the case of the large data amount or models executed in different platforms and in various types of codes. To evaluate the impact of time synchronization on the rainfall-runoff process in a coupled hydrodynamic model, a new model that couples the 2D GPU accelerated shallow water model and the 1D SWMM is applied to two urban catchments to simulate the rainfall-runoff-drainage processes, the fixed time step (5 s, 10 s, 30 s, 60 s, 120 s, 180 s and 300 s) is adopted to ensure the calculation efficiency and precision of the model. The results show that the time computational efficiency can be improved by 7.27%–27.37% in different scenarios compared with the method applying 2D model time step as the synchronization time; the surface runoff process is hardly affected as the synchronization time changes; and the relative error of the drainage process is less than 2.5% when the synchronization time is less than 60 s. Therefore, the fixed synchronization time method is recommended in the 1D-2D coupled model to improve the computational efficiency for flood and inundation simulation. Based on the advantage that the fixed synchronization time is easy to realize in the programming of the model and the high efficiency of the fixed synchronization time method concluded above, this work is expected to provide a reference for model coupling applications.