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Urban and River Flooding: Theory, Experimental and Numerical Models, and Applications in Hydraulic Engineering

A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Hydraulics and Hydrodynamics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (26 September 2022) | Viewed by 20511

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Energy, Construction and Environment & Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK
Interests: hydraulics; environmental fluid mechanics; urban and coastal flooding; sustainable urban drainage systems; pollutant transport; river regulation; dynamic water surface patterns; advanced experimental flow measurement; climate change mitigation and adaptation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Scool of Rural and Surveying Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 9, Iroon Polytechniou str, 15780 Zografou, Athens, Greece
Interests: hydraulics; hydrology; flood modelling; fluvial and pluvial floods; urban flooding; flood risk; uncertainty analysis; machine learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Faculty of Engineering, Environment and Computing, School of Energy, Construction and Environment, Coventry University, Coventry, UK
Interests: environmental hydraulics and pollution transport in environmental flows; advanced experimental flow measurement
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Instituto Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua, Paseo Cuauhnáhuac 8532, Progreso 62550, Morelos, Mexico
Interests: urban hydrology; sustainable drainage; hydrometeorology; urban drainage numerical modelling

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The frequency and magnitude of pluvial and fluvial flood events is projected to rise worldwide, causing substantial associated economic and public health costs. To tackle this global issue, numerical models have been developed to predict the interactions within the variables in place (e.g., flow rates, rainfall intentisites, geographical location, and local characteristics) to identify the areas that could be most at risk of flooding. Despite the recent progress related to the development of new large-scale models, which enables analyzing and simulating different processes in controlled environments under close-to-reality conditions, and despite the parallel  evolution of more accurate novel measurement techniques, such as imaging techniques or the application of low-cost technologies, such models are inherently difficult to verify because of the paucity of data essential for calibration and validation purposes. In addition, there is the need to investigate not only the causes and effects of these flooding events, but it is also crucial to provide a better understanding of these scenerios in order to implement systems that are resilient to challenges such as climate change and population growth.

The aim of this Special Issue is to gather research papers investigating  hydrodynamics,  sediment transport, dispersion of pollutants, and water quality that are related to urban and river flooding in order to (i) develop more accurate predictions of future events, (ii) identify new techniques to make cities more sustainable and resilient to these disasters, and (iii) aid local and national authorities to move towards the digitalization of the water sector for a more efficient management. This Special Issue is therefore open to experimental, theoretical, and numerical studies and field works, as well as all contributions including innovative solutions, novel instrumentation, and the application of usual devices to new developments.

Dr. Matteo Rubinato
Dr. Vasilis Bellos
Dr. James Hart
Dr. Laurent Courty
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • urban and river flooding
  • sediment transport
  • urban wash-off
  • pollutant transport and dispersion
  • sustainability
  • climate change
  • urbanization
  • flood resilience
  • water management
  • experimental and numerical modelling

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 6760 KiB  
Article
Relationship of Rainfall and Flood Return Periods through Hydrologic and Hydraulic Modeling
by Harris Vangelis, Ioanna Zotou, Ioannis M. Kourtis, Vasilis Bellos and Vassilios A. Tsihrintzis
Water 2022, 14(22), 3618; https://doi.org/10.3390/w14223618 - 10 Nov 2022
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4384
Abstract
In order to examine the relationship between rainfall return periods and flood return periods, the design storm approach is compared to the rainfall–runoff continuous simulation and flood frequency analysis approach. The former was based on rainfall frequency analysis and event-based hydrological simulations, while [...] Read more.
In order to examine the relationship between rainfall return periods and flood return periods, the design storm approach is compared to the rainfall–runoff continuous simulation and flood frequency analysis approach. The former was based on rainfall frequency analysis and event-based hydrological simulations, while the latter was based on continuous hydrological simulations and flood frequency analysis. All hydrological simulations were undertaken employing the HEC-HMS software. For the rainfall frequency analysis, the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) probability distribution was used. For the flood frequency analysis, both the Extreme Value Type I (Gumbel) and GEV theoretical distributions were used and compared to each other. Flood hazard (inundation depth, flow velocities and flood extent) was estimated based on hydrodynamic simulations employing the HEC-RAS software. The study area was the Pineios catchment, upstream of Larissa city, Greece. The results revealed that the assumption of equivalent return periods of rainfall and discharge is not valid for the study area. For instance, a 50-year return period flood corresponds to a rainfall return period of about 110 years. Even if flow measurements are not available, continuous simulation based on re-analysis datasets and flood frequency analysis may be alternatively used. Full article
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20 pages, 6592 KiB  
Article
Assessing the Performance of LISFLOOD-FP and SWMM for a Small Watershed with Scarce Data Availability
by Farzaneh Sadeghi, Matteo Rubinato, Marcel Goerke and James Hart
Water 2022, 14(5), 748; https://doi.org/10.3390/w14050748 - 26 Feb 2022
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 4960
Abstract
Flooding events are becoming more frequent and the negative impacts that they are causing globally are very significant. Current predictions have confirmed that conditions linked with future climate scenarios are worsening; therefore, there is a strong need to improve flood risk modeling and [...] Read more.
Flooding events are becoming more frequent and the negative impacts that they are causing globally are very significant. Current predictions have confirmed that conditions linked with future climate scenarios are worsening; therefore, there is a strong need to improve flood risk modeling and to develop innovative approaches to tackle this issue. However, the numerical tools available nowadays (commercial and freeware) need essential data for calibration and validation purposes and, regrettably, this cannot always be provided in every country for dissimilar reasons. This work aims to examine the quality and capabilities of open-source numerical flood modeling tools and their data preparation process in situations where calibration datasets may be of poor quality or not available at all. For this purpose, EPA’s Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) was selected to investigate 1D modeling and LISFLOOD-FP was chosen for 2D modeling. The simulation results obtained with freeware products showed that both models are reasonably capable of detecting flood features such as critical points, flooding extent, and water depth. However, although working with them is more challenging than working with commercial products, the quality of the results relative to the reference map was acceptable. Therefore, this study demonstrated that LISFLOOD-FP and SWMM can cope with the lack of these variables as a starting point and has provided steps to undertake to generate reliable results for the need required, which is the estimation of the impacts of flooding events and the likelihood of their occurrence. Full article
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18 pages, 12583 KiB  
Article
Development and Application of an Urban Flood Forecasting and Warning Process to Reduce Urban Flood Damage: A Case Study of Dorim River Basin, Seoul
by Yong-Man Won, Jung-Hwan Lee, Hyeon-Tae Moon and Young-Il Moon
Water 2022, 14(2), 187; https://doi.org/10.3390/w14020187 - 10 Jan 2022
Cited by 25 | Viewed by 3908
Abstract
Early and accurate flood forecasting and warning for urban flood risk areas is an essential factor to reduce flood damage. This paper presents the urban flood forecasting and warning process to reduce damage in the main flood risk area of South Korea. This [...] Read more.
Early and accurate flood forecasting and warning for urban flood risk areas is an essential factor to reduce flood damage. This paper presents the urban flood forecasting and warning process to reduce damage in the main flood risk area of South Korea. This process is developed based on the rainfall-runoff model and deep learning model. A model-driven method was devised to construct the accurate physical model with combined inland-river and flood control facilities, such as pump stations and underground storages. To calibrate the rainfall-runoff model, data of gauging stations and pump stations of an urban stream in August 2020 were used, and the model result was presented as an R2 value of 0.63~0.79. Accurate flood warning criteria of the urban stream were analyzed according to the various rainfall scenarios from the model-driven method. As flood forecasting and warning in the urban stream, deep learning models, vanilla ANN, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Stack-LSTM, and Bidirectional LSTM were constructed. Deep learning models using 10-min hydrological time-series data from gauging stations were trained to warn of expected flood risks based on the water level in the urban stream. A forecasting and warning method that applied the bidirectional LSTM showed an R2 value of 0.9 for the water level forecast with 30 min lead time, indicating the possibility of effective flood forecasting and warning. This case study aims to contribute to the reduction of casualties and flood damage in urban streams and accurate flood warnings in typical urban flood risk areas of South Korea. The developed urban flood forecasting and warning process can be applied effectively as a non-structural measure to mitigate urban flood damage and can be extended considering watershed characteristics. Full article
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19 pages, 2462 KiB  
Article
Living with Urban Flooding: A Continuous Learning Process for Local Municipalities and Lessons Learnt from the 2021 Events in Germany
by Bert Bosseler, Mirko Salomon, Marco Schlüter and Matteo Rubinato
Water 2021, 13(19), 2769; https://doi.org/10.3390/w13192769 - 6 Oct 2021
Cited by 25 | Viewed by 5873
Abstract
In 2021, heavy precipitation events in Germany have confirmed once again that pluvial flooding can cause catastrophic damage in large, medium, and small cities. However, despite several hazard-oriented strategies already in place, to date there is still a lack of integrated approaches to [...] Read more.
In 2021, heavy precipitation events in Germany have confirmed once again that pluvial flooding can cause catastrophic damage in large, medium, and small cities. However, despite several hazard-oriented strategies already in place, to date there is still a lack of integrated approaches to actually preventing negative consequences induced by heavy rainfall events. Furthermore, municipalities across the world are still learning from recent episodes and there is a general need to explore new techniques and guidelines that could help to reduce vulnerability, and enhance the resilience, adaptive capacity, and sustainability of urban environments, considering the already predicted future challenges associated with climate variability. To address this gap, this paper presents the outcomes of the research project “Heavy Rainfall Checklist for Sewer Operation” which was conducted by IKT Institute for Underground Infrastructure, to involve all the stakeholders affected by pluvial flooding within cities, and implement a series of documents that can be adopted by municipalities across the world to support organizations and their operational staff in preventing problems caused by heavy rainfall incidents. More in detail, three different rainfall scenarios have been deeply analysed, and for each of them a list of specific tasks and suggestions has been provided for aiding decision-making. Full article
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