Add Dam-Break Simulation in Flood Simulation

BernardoMartins97PT — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 17:22:57 GMT

Add the ability to model dam breaks in the Flood Simulation tab, including configurable breach location, width, formation time, and initial reservoir level, etc.

Re: Add Dam-Break Simulation in Flood Simulation

NathanShephard — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 19:52:22 GMT

Thanks Bernardo!

Unfortunately, the "shallow water equations" upon which the flood simulation water modeling is based are not well-suited for catastrophic dam-wall failure use-cases. The main problem is that the water does not "break". That is, the wall of water won't crash forward (like a wave on the beach"), but rather it "pushes down" from gravity to move to the next processing cell in the simulation. This means the water moves differently (generally speaking it is slower and less turbulent) than it would for a true breach event, which limits its usefulness for this case.

The nearest (semi-related) case would be "venting" a dam, where you're modeling an open gate where water is coming out at some defined rate. This could be done with a Water Source element (from either a point or area source), and water will flow down from there. If you had calculations for estimated water flow rate through time for a particular scenario, you could run a flood simulation where those rates are applied.

Note - for fast and/or deep water movement, we recommend using the "High" temporal resolution option (on the Simulation ribbon tab). However... water movement will always use the non-breaking-wave math.

Hope this helps!

Thanks,

-Nathan.

PS - In case you've not seen it yet, the full Technical Paper is available here:

Link: Esri - ../technical-papers/flood-simulation-arcgis-pro.pdf

idea Add Dam-Break Simulation in Flood Simulation in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

Add Dam-Break Simulation in Flood Simulation

Re: Add Dam-Break Simulation in Flood Simulation