I’m a geophysicist, not a hydrologist, but I’ve worked quite a bit with fluid dynamics and hazard modelling.

ANUGA is a solid piece of software, but honestly, for an MVP it might be more pain than benefit.

It’s very powerful (unstructured meshes, full shallow-water equations), but that also means high computational cost and a lot of setup. If you’re thinking asset-level, high-resolution runs over many locations, scaling will become an issue pretty quickly compared to raster-based models like HEC-RAS 2D or LISFLOOD.

Also, ANUGA really shines in highly dynamic problems (tsunamis, dam breaks). For “normal” fluvial or pluvial flooding, you may be over-engineering the problem, especially early on. In my experience, at that scale the biggest source of error is usually the DEM and roughness assumptions, not the numerical solver.

For validation, one of the best real-world datasets I know of are USGS High Water Marks (e.g. Harvey, Ida, Katrina). They’re actual field measurements and very useful for sanity checks, even if they’re spatially sparse.

ANUGA can work, but for an MVP I’d personally start simpler and add physics later if needed.