Skip to content

Structures

Structures represent building footprints or other solid obstacles within the domain. They modify both the elevation and the friction of the mesh.

How structures work

When structures are present, two things happen during mesh setup:

  1. Elevation burn — Building footprints are rasterised onto the DEM with a height of 5.0m added (using gdal_rasterize). This raises the ground surface to prevent water flowing through buildings.

  2. Friction override — Building polygons receive a Manning's roughness coefficient of 10.0, further impeding any flow that does reach the raised elevation.

Methods

Each structure feature has a method property:

Method Behaviour
Mannings Applies high friction (n=10) to the polygon
Holes Removes the polygon from the mesh entirely
Reflective Creates a reflective internal boundary

Note

The Holes and Reflective methods are experimental. For most use cases, the default Mannings method with elevation burn is recommended.