Surface runoff determination in urban areas is crucial to facilitate ex ante water planning, especially in the context of climate and land cover changes, which are increasing the frequency of floods, due to a combination of violent storms and increased imperviousness. To this end, the spatial identification of urban areas prone to runoff accumulation is essential, to guarantee effective water management in the future. Under these premises, this work sought to produce a tool for automated determination of urban surface runoff using a geographic information systems (GIS). This tool, which was designed as an ArcGIS add-in called ArcDrain, consists of the discretization of urban areas into subcatchments and the subsequent application of the rational method for runoff depth estimation. The formulation of this method directly depends on land cover type and soil permeability, thereby enabling the identification of areas with a low infiltration capacity. ArcDrain was tested using the city of Santander (northern Spain) as a case study. The results achieved demonstrated the accuracy of the tool for detecting high runoff rates and how the inclusion of mitigation measures in the form of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) and green infrastructure (GI) can help reduce flood hazards in critical zones.
Rockfall events are one of the most frequent types of mass wasting in mountainous areas, causing service and traffic disruption, as well as infrastructure and human damage. Hence, having accurate tools to model these hazards becomes crucial to prevent fatalities, especially in a context of Climate Change whereby the effects of these phenomena might be exacerbated. Under this premise, this research concerned the development of a framework for assessing rockfall hazard in mountainous areas. First, a set of factors expected to favour rockfalls were processed and aggregated using spatial analysis tools, yielding a series of hazard maps with which to fit observed data through statistical modelling. The validation process was undertaken with the support of a database containing the number of rocks removed from a mountainous road section located in Cantabria, northern Spain. The results achieved, which demonstrated the accuracy of the proposed approach to reproduce rockfall hazard using frequency data, highlighted the primary role played by factors such as slope, runoff threshold and precipitation to explain the occurrence of these events. The effects of Climate Change were considerably influenced by the fluctuations in the projections of precipitation, which limited the variations in the spatial distribution and magnitude of rockfall hazard.
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