The propagation of rapid gravity-driven flows (Iverson & Denlinger, 2001) occurring in mountainous or volcanic areas is a complex and hazardous phenomenon. A wide variety of events are associated with these flows, such as rock avalanches, debris avalanches and debris, mud or hyper-concentrated flows (Hungr et al., 2014). The understanding and estimation of their propagation processes is important for sediment fluxes quantification, for the study of landscapes dynamics. Besides, gravity-driven flows can have a significant economic impact and endanger local populations (Hungr et al., 2005;Petley, 2012;Froude & Petley, 2018). In order to mitigate these risks, it is of prior importance to estimate the runout, dynamic impact and travel time of potential gravitational flows.This can be done empirically, but physically based modeling is needed to investigate more precisely the dynamics of the flow, in particular due to the first-order role of local topography. Over the past decades, thin-layer models (also called shallow-water models) have been increasingly used by practitioners. Their main assumption is that the flow extent is much larger than its thickness, so that the kinematic unknowns are reduced to two variables: the flow thickness and its depth-averaged velocity. The dimension of the problem is thus lower, allowing for relatively fast numerical computations. The first and simplest form of thin-layer equations was given by Barré de Saint-Venant (1871) for almost flat topographies. The 1D formulation (i.e., for topographies given by a 1D graph Z = Z(X)) for any bed inclination and small curvatures was derived by Savage and Hutter (1991). This model has since been extended to real 2D topographies (i.e., given by a 2D graph Z = Z (X, Y)). Some of the software products based on thin-layer equations are currently used for hazard assessment to derive, for instance, maps of maximum flow height and velocity. Examples include RAMMS (