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Yu et al. 2016 Environmental Research Letters final.pdf (7.15 MB)

Validating city-scale surface water flood modelling using crowd-sourced data

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posted on 2016-12-08, 10:56 authored by Dapeng YuDapeng Yu, Jie Yin, Min Liu
Surface water and surface water related flood modelling at the city-scale is challenging due to a range of factors including the availability of subsurface data and difficulty in deriving runoff inputs and surcharge for individual storm sewer inlets. Most of the research undertaken so far has been focusing on local-scale predictions of sewer surcharge induced surface flooding, using a 1D/1D or 1D/2D coupled storm sewer and surface flow model. In this study, we describe the application of an urban hydro-inundation model (FloodMap-HydroInundation2D) to simulate surface water related flooding arising from extreme precipitation at the city-scale. This approach was applied to model an extreme storm event that occurred on 12 August 2011 in the city of Shanghai, China, and the model predictions were compared with a ‘crowd-sourced’ dataset of flood incidents. The results suggest that the model is able to capture the broad patterns of inundated areas at the city-scale. Temporal evaluation also demonstrates a good level of agreement between the reported and predicted flood timing. Due to the mild terrain of the city, the worst-hit areas are predicted to be topographic lows. The spatio-temporal accuracy of the precipitation and micro-topography are the two critical factors that affect the prediction accuracies. Future studies could be directed towards making more accurate and robust predictions of water depth and velocity using higher quality topographic, precipitation and drainage capacity information.

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No: 41201550, 41371493) and the Project of Joint Center for Shanghai Meteorological Science and Technology (Grant No:2015-03).

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Environmental Research Letters

Citation

YU, D., YIN, J. and LIU, M., 2016. Validating city-scale surface water flood modelling using crowd-sourced data. Environmental Research Letters, 11 (12), pp. 124011-124011.

Publisher

© IOP Publishing

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Acceptance date

2016-11-16

Publication date

2016-11-30

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by IOP under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

eISSN

1748-9326

Language

  • en

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