Why are decisions in flood disaster management so poorly supported by information from flood models?

Leskens, J.G.; Brugnach, Marcela; Hoekstra, Arjen Ysbert; Schuurmans, W.

doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2013.11.003

Cited by 105 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…In addition, the input data requirements and data manipulation required for these models to run may exceed the technical capabilities of the broader non-expert safety community (Nastev et al 2015). These existing models therefore leave a gap between what is needed (and when) by decision makers and the output a model is able to provide (Leskens et al, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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RAPID RISK EVALUATION (ER²) USING MS EXCEL SPREADSHEET: A CASE STUDY OF FREDERICTON (NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA)

McGrath

Stefanakis

Nastev

2016

ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.

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ABSTRACT:Conventional knowledge of the flood hazard alone (extent and frequency) is not sufficient for informed decision-making. The public safety community needs tools and guidance to adequately undertake flood hazard risk assessment in order to estimate respective damages and social and economic losses. While many complex computer models have been developed for flood risk assessment, they require highly trained personnel to prepare the necessary input (hazard, inventory of the built environment, and vulnerabilities) and analyze model outputs. As such, tools which utilize open-source software or are built within popular desktop software programs are appealing alternatives. The recently developed Rapid Risk Evaluation (ER 2 ) application runs scenario based loss assessment analyses in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. User input is limited to a handful of intuitive drop-down menus utilized to describe the building type, age, occupancy and the expected water level. In anticipation of local depth damage curves and other needed vulnerability parameters, those from the U.S. FEMA's Hazus-Flood software have been imported and temporarily accessed in conjunction with user input to display exposure and estimated economic losses related to the structure and the content of the building. Building types and occupancies representative of those most exposed to flooding in Fredericton (New Brunswick) were introduced and test flood scenarios were run. The algorithm was successfully validated against results from the Hazus-Flood model for the same building types and flood depths.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 2010, an estimated 178 million people across the world were affected by flooding and billions of dollars of damage caused (Leskens, Brugnach, Hoekstra, & Schuurmans, 2014). The costliest single disaster on record in Canada is the 2013 flood in Calgary, AB, with a price tag exceeding $6 billion (Environment Canada, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

RAPID RISK EVALUATION (ER²) USING MS EXCEL SPREADSHEET: A CASE STUDY OF FREDERICTON (NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA)

McGrath

Stefanakis

Nastev

2016

ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.

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“…On the other hand, flood risk practitioners generally lack the time and resources to perform complex analyses, or to incorporate the results of complex analyses in their decisions [16]. Therefore, they are often reluctant to adopt more complex modelling procedures (or procedures that they are not familiar with) that are desirable, but which can also increase the complexity of the modelling problem [15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The researchers generally frame flood risk issues using scientific knowledge and expertise. Therefore, they assume that more detailed models will generally lead to more accurate model predictions and thus better decisions can be made [15]. On the other hand, flood risk practitioners generally lack the time and resources to perform complex analyses, or to incorporate the results of complex analyses in their decisions [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flood Inundation Modelling of Flash Floods in Steep River Basins and Catchments

Kvočka¹,

Ahmadian²,

Falconer³

2017

Water

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Abstract:The potential flood inundation extent can be estimated with flood inundation models, which can differ in the level of physical and numerical modelling complexity included in the solution procedure. In recent years, several studies have highlighted the benefits of shock-capturing flood inundation models, particularly when modelling a high Froude number or supercritical flows, or in areas prone to the occurrence of rapidly varying flood events, such as flash floods. Nonetheless, decision makers are often reluctant to implement more complex modelling tools into practical flood inundation modelling studies, unless evidence is provided to establish when such refined modelling tools should be used. The main objective of this study was to determine a general threshold value of the bottom slope that could be used by decision makers as an orientation guide to ascertain when to use a specific type of flood inundation model. The results obtained suggest that in torrential river basins or catchments (i.e., river basins and catchments with a bed slope generally greater than 1%), the flood inundation modelling should be conducted by using a flood inundation model that include shock-capturing algorithms in the model solution procedure.

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“…In practice, trivial and time-consuming operations to integrate various resources have cost most the manual resources rather than improving the decision-making (Laniak et al, 2013). This is why most existing disaster management systems have been of limited use (Leskens et al, 2014) and resources cannot be fully utilized (Demir and Krajewski, 2013;Zhishan et al, 2012). This paper proposes a task-oriented disaster information link method, in which disaster emergency tasks are regarded as a key semantic factor to restrain, associate and aggregate spatial-temporal data.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Task-Driven Disaster Data Link Approach

Qiu

Zhu

et al. 2015

Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.

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ABSTRACT:With the rapid development of sensor networks and Earth observation technology, a large quantity of disaster-related data is available, such as remotely sensed data, historic data, cases data, simulation data, disaster products and so on. However, the efficiency of current data management and service systems has become increasingly serious due to the task variety and heterogeneous data. For emergency task-oriented applications, data searching mainly relies on artificial experience based on simple metadata index, whose high time-consuming and low accuracy cannot satisfy the requirements of disaster products on velocity and veracity. In this paper, a task-oriented linking method is proposed for efficient disaster data management and intelligent service, with the objectives of 1) putting forward ontologies of disaster task and data to unify the different semantics of multi-source information, 2) identifying the semantic mapping from emergency tasks to multiple sources on the basis of uniform description in 1), 3) linking task-related data automatically and calculating the degree of correlation between each data and a target task. The method breaks through traditional static management of disaster data and establishes a base for intelligent retrieval and active push of disaster information. The case study presented in this paper illustrates the use of the method with a flood emergency relief task.

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Why are decisions in flood disaster management so poorly supported by information from flood models?

Cited by 105 publications

References 43 publications

RAPID RISK EVALUATION (ER²) USING MS EXCEL SPREADSHEET: A CASE STUDY OF FREDERICTON (NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA)

RAPID RISK EVALUATION (ER²) USING MS EXCEL SPREADSHEET: A CASE STUDY OF FREDERICTON (NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA)

Flood Inundation Modelling of Flash Floods in Steep River Basins and Catchments

A Task-Driven Disaster Data Link Approach

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Why are decisions in flood disaster management so poorly supported by information from flood models?

Cited by 105 publications

References 43 publications

RAPID RISK EVALUATION (ER2) USING MS EXCEL SPREADSHEET: A CASE STUDY OF FREDERICTON (NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA)

RAPID RISK EVALUATION (ER2) USING MS EXCEL SPREADSHEET: A CASE STUDY OF FREDERICTON (NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA)

Flood Inundation Modelling of Flash Floods in Steep River Basins and Catchments

A Task-Driven Disaster Data Link Approach

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

RAPID RISK EVALUATION (ER²) USING MS EXCEL SPREADSHEET: A CASE STUDY OF FREDERICTON (NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA)

RAPID RISK EVALUATION (ER²) USING MS EXCEL SPREADSHEET: A CASE STUDY OF FREDERICTON (NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA)