Modelling urban floods at sub-metre resolution: challenges or opportunities for flood risk management?
Modelling urban floods at sub-metre resolution: challenges or opportunities for flood risk management?
In this study, we investigate the influence of fine-scale changes in the elevation of urban terrains on the dynamics and final distribution of flood inundation generated by intense rainfall. Numerical experiments have been performed combining two-dimensional shallow water model with extremely fine-resolution (10 cm) terrain data. Our results reveal that localised, decimetric-scale alterations in the elevation of streets can lead to remarkable differences in the flood inundation. These results confirm the important role played by finely resolved and accurate terrain data in capturing flow patterns that have a central impact on model predictions of flood inundation. Also, we argue that the observed sensitivity of flood inundation to small-scale topographical features paves the way to new opportunities for flood risk management measures. In particular, engineering flood resilient urban surfaces using fine-resolution models has a potential to considerably reduce flood impacts at a relatively low cost.
S855–S865
de Almeida, Gustavo A. M.
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Bates, P
e8df13bc-adab-4877-a8fc-14c812e32bd2
Ozdemir, Hasan
ba849256-8fee-4f6d-9433-7c11c479581e
de Almeida, Gustavo A. M.
f6edffc1-7bb3-443f-8829-e471b6514a7e
Bates, P
e8df13bc-adab-4877-a8fc-14c812e32bd2
Ozdemir, Hasan
ba849256-8fee-4f6d-9433-7c11c479581e
de Almeida, Gustavo A. M., Bates, P and Ozdemir, Hasan
(2016)
Modelling urban floods at sub-metre resolution: challenges or opportunities for flood risk management?
Journal of Flood Risk Management, 11 (S2), .
(doi:10.1111/jfr3.12276).
Abstract
In this study, we investigate the influence of fine-scale changes in the elevation of urban terrains on the dynamics and final distribution of flood inundation generated by intense rainfall. Numerical experiments have been performed combining two-dimensional shallow water model with extremely fine-resolution (10 cm) terrain data. Our results reveal that localised, decimetric-scale alterations in the elevation of streets can lead to remarkable differences in the flood inundation. These results confirm the important role played by finely resolved and accurate terrain data in capturing flow patterns that have a central impact on model predictions of flood inundation. Also, we argue that the observed sensitivity of flood inundation to small-scale topographical features paves the way to new opportunities for flood risk management measures. In particular, engineering flood resilient urban surfaces using fine-resolution models has a potential to considerably reduce flood impacts at a relatively low cost.
Text
deAlmeida_et_al_JFRM.pdf
- Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 19 September 2016
e-pub ahead of print date: 7 November 2016
Organisations:
Faculty of Engineering and the Environment
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 401091
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/401091
PURE UUID: 73be2f08-72f8-40f3-8c4a-4bae312c91d9
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Date deposited: 07 Oct 2016 09:16
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 05:56
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Author:
P Bates
Author:
Hasan Ozdemir
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