Background

The model is essentially a stripped down translation of the CAESAR-Lisflood model, but without the GUI, and it runs on Linux unlike CAESAR-Lisflood, which is Windows only (as of 2017). If you are happy to run on Windows, and would prefer to use a model with a GUI-mode where you can view the output of your simulation in real-time, then CAESAR-Lisflood is a good choice for this. HAIL-CAESAR is designed to be faster and cross platform, will scale up to running across multi-core compute workstations and cluster PCs, and can be run to simulate multiple-member ensembles to explore model sensitivity. One of the drawbacks to the original model is that you need a dedicated Windows box to do your simulations, you can’t send them off to a cluster computer-type facility, which typically run Unix. (Unless you have a bunch of spare Windows PCs…)

The raster data handling is done using the libraries from the LSDTopoTools package, and so can be used in the same workflow as LSDTopoTools to do topographic analysis on your model output.