How much does an extreme rainfall event cost? Material damage and relationships between insurance, rainfall, land cover and urban flooding

Leal, Miguel; Boavida-Portugal, Inês; Fragoso, Marcelo; Ramos, Catarina

doi:10.1080/02626667.2019.1595625

Cited by 23 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 65 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Furthermore, they depend on how well the storm drainage system and the associated infrastructure respond to a sudden precipitation storm. The damage depends not only on the event intensity and duration but also on physical and social urban characteristics [9][10][11]. The European Flood Directive widely implements flood hazard maps for rivers and coastal areas, but corresponding efforts are scarce for pluvial flooding [8,12,13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Hazard Assessment for Pluvial Floods in Urban Environments: A Benchmarking Case Study for the City of Berlin, Germany

Seleem

Heistermann

Bronstert

2021

Water

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The presence of impermeable surfaces in urban areas hinders natural drainage and directs the surface runoff to storm drainage systems with finite capacity, which makes these areas prone to pluvial flooding. The occurrence of pluvial flooding depends on the existence of minimal areas for surface runoff generation and concentration. Detailed hydrologic and hydrodynamic simulations are computationally expensive and require intensive resources. This study compared and evaluated the performance of two simplified methods to identify urban pluvial flood-prone areas, namely the fill–spill–merge (FSM) method and the topographic wetness index (TWI) method and used the TELEMAC-2D hydrodynamic numerical model for benchmarking and validation. The FSM method uses common GIS operations to identify flood-prone depressions from a high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM). The TWI method employs the maximum likelihood method (MLE) to probabilistically calibrate a TWI threshold (τ) based on the inundation maps from a 2D hydrodynamic model for a given spatial window (W) within the urban area. We found that the FSM method clearly outperforms the TWI method both conceptually and effectively in terms of model performance.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Hazard Assessment for Pluvial Floods in Urban Environments: A Benchmarking Case Study for the City of Berlin, Germany

Seleem

Heistermann

Bronstert

2021

Water

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…On the global scale there are similar concerns. Cities are becoming more exposed to flooding (Leal et al, 2019) and the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report records very high confidence that flooding and other climate‐related risks are increasing in urban areas and sees their impacts as widespread (Revi et al, 2014). Even if global warming is limited to +1.5°C, flood hazard and risk would still increase in some regions compared to present day levels (Hoegh‐Guldberg et al, n.d.).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

China's ‘Sponge Cities’: The role of constructed wetlands in alleviating urban pluvial flooding

Zhou

Penning‐Rowsell

2021

Water & Environment J

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Research examined constructed wetlands (CWs) in piloting the ‘Sponge City’, a Chinese initiative designed, in part, to curtail extensive urban pluvial flooding. In Yangzhou a small number of exploratory qualitative interviews with relevant professionals elucidated key issues. The interviewees supported the concept of CWs but were uniformly sceptical about their viability. A possible CW in the city was also modelled, quantifying its effects and limitations. Results show that CWs can help attenuate urban flooding but there are important caveats concerning their implementation. These concern their size and capacity, sufficiency of urban space, and their economic sustainability. The political dimension of the Sponge City concept, including support from President Xi Jinping, suggests that CWs may be a distraction from more widespread urban flooding, which CWs may well not alleviate. Piloting is continuing and results will need to be more positive if Sponge Cities can be a strategically important flood attenuation measure.

show abstract

“…The type and intensity of the produced impacts depend on the magnitude and frequency of the event, but also on intrinsic factors of the affected urban system, both physical (geographic, morphological, typological, technical, constructional, etc.) and social urban characteristics (see e.g., [10]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Safer_RAIN: A DEM-Based Hierarchical Filling-&-Spilling Algorithm for Pluvial Flood Hazard Assessment and Mapping across Large Urban Areas

Samela

Persiano

Bagli

et al. 2020

Water

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The increase in frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events caused by the changing climate (e.g., cloudbursts, rainstorms, heavy rainfall, hail, heavy snow), combined with the high population density and concentration of assets, makes urban areas particularly vulnerable to pluvial flooding. Hence, assessing their vulnerability under current and future climate scenarios is of paramount importance. Detailed hydrologic-hydraulic numerical modeling is resource intensive and therefore scarcely suitable for performing consistent hazard assessments across large urban settlements. Given the steadily increasing availability of LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) high-resolution DEMs (Digital Elevation Models), several studies highlighted the potential of fast-processing DEM-based methods, such as the Hierarchical Filling-&-Spilling or Puddle-to-Puddle Dynamic Filling-&-Spilling Algorithms (abbreviated herein as HFSAs). We develop a fast-processing HFSA, named Safer_RAIN, that enables mapping of pluvial flooding in large urban areas by accounting for spatially distributed rainfall input and infiltration processes through a pixel-based Green-Ampt model. We present the first applications of the algorithm to two case studies in Northern Italy. Safer_RAIN output is compared against ground evidence and detailed output from a two-dimensional (2D) hydrologic and hydraulic numerical model (overall index of agreement between Safer_RAIN and 2D benchmark model: sensitivity and specificity up to 71% and 99%, respectively), highlighting potential and limitations of the proposed algorithm for identifying pluvial flood-hazard hotspots across large urban environments.

show abstract

How much does an extreme rainfall event cost? Material damage and relationships between insurance, rainfall, land cover and urban flooding

Cited by 23 publications

References 65 publications

Efficient Hazard Assessment for Pluvial Floods in Urban Environments: A Benchmarking Case Study for the City of Berlin, Germany

Efficient Hazard Assessment for Pluvial Floods in Urban Environments: A Benchmarking Case Study for the City of Berlin, Germany

China's ‘Sponge Cities’: The role of constructed wetlands in alleviating urban pluvial flooding

Safer_RAIN: A DEM-Based Hierarchical Filling-&-Spilling Algorithm for Pluvial Flood Hazard Assessment and Mapping across Large Urban Areas

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About