How to divide a catchment to conquer its parallel processing. An efficient algorithm for the partitioning of water catchments

For the sake of distributed modelling, water catchments are subdivided into a set of subareas whose number is theoretically unbounded. To cope with such a computational challenge—100 to 100,000 subareas are usual—the subareas which are to be calculated separately could be distributed among several networked (multiprocessors) computers. By the means of graph theory and the analysis of ‘typical’ routing systems, the present paper develops an heuristic algorithm to partition the set of subareas into subsets, each of them assigned to a particular processor such that the computational load of the processors is balanced, and the need for interprocess-communication is minimal.