Dam-break flood modeling for Tangjiashan Quake Lake

摘要

On May 12th 2008, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck in Southwest China, triggered massive landslides and created many unstable and dangerous quake lakes. As a secondary disaster of earthquake, Quake Lake usually breaks after damming up a large amount of water and threatens cities and villages in the downstream area. This paper is devoted to modeling the dam break and analyzing the flow hydrograph coming out of the breach for quake lakes with the BREACH method. We simulate the formation of dam breach and the flood discharge with a case of the Tangjiashan Quake Lake, and analyze the hydraulic impacts of dam-break, flood on the downstream areas. The results can facilitate the assessment on the flood risk of quake lake caused by earthquake, and also can be used to estimate the magnitude and extent of dam-break flood with Earth observations.