Decentralized Nature-based Solutions such as Urban Green Infrastructures (UGI) are increasingly promoted to reduce flooding in urban areas. Many studies have shown the effectiveness of flood control of UGI at a plot or neighbourhood level. Modelling approaches that extrapolate their flood reducing impact to larger catchment scales are often based on a simplistic assumption of different percentages of UGI implementation. Additionally, such approaches typically do not consider the suitable space for UGI and potential implementation constraints. This study proposes a scenario development and modelling approach for a more realistic upscaling of UGI based on empirical insights from a representative neighbourhood. The results from this study, conducted in the metropolitan area of Costa Rica, show that upscaling the full potential for UGI could significantly reduce surface runoff, peak flows, and flood volumes. In particular, the permeable pavement has the highest potential for flood reducing in public space while cisterns perform best at the property level. These results can guide the formation of policies that promote UGI.

In the original publication, the affiliation of all the authors were mixed up and processed incorrectly. It has been updated in this correction.

No abstract

EPA SWMM hydraulic modeling requires the estimation of different parameters allowing the determination of the basin's response upon a given precipitation event. Some physical parameters, such as area or perimeter, are measurable and can be accurately determined; however, other parameter estimation presents greater uncertainty, such as the width parameter. For regular and uniform drainage areas, width parameter estimation is relatively simple; however, when a complete irregular basin analysis is required, width determination presents greater uncertainty, and its representativeness becomes complicated to define. Width determination is idealized with the representation of a rectangle, where, for an equal area, a higher width will result in a faster response of the basin, while a lower width will result in a slower response of the basin. This paper attempts to estimate a representative value of width for a realistic, irregularly shaped basin by defining the equivalent rectangle, which takes into account the area, perimeter, and compactness index of the basin. The compactness index can be used to classify the basin by its shape. The shape of the basin is an indicator of how the precipitation histograms are temporally distributed and how the water flows through the basin, i.e., it defines the response speed of the basin, as the width parameter does in modeling. The width parameter has a high sensitivity in the EPA SWMM modeling results; therefore, an inaccurate estimation of the parameter leads to unrepresentative results. For this reason, this study seeks to find an optimal methodology to reduce modeling uncertainty and achieve more accurate simulations of an irregular watershed's hydrological response.