Assessment of Historical Flood Risk to the Groundwater Regime: Case Study of the Kolubara Coal Basin, Serbia

Abstract

Heavy rainfall and slow movement of the cyclone Tamara caused record floods in May 2014 across Serbia. As a result, levees were breached, a large portion of the open-pit lignite mine Tamnava-West Field was flooded and a flood lake was created. Due to an active hydraulic link with aquifers, the water table rose and the amount of stored groundwater increased dramatically. Based on in situ surveys and hydrodynamic modeling, three distinct periods of the groundwater regime are identified and the flood impact on the groundwater regime in the study area quantified. The paper describes correlations between flood lake water levels and the water table, and shows calculated groundwater volumes as a result of flooding and those of residual groundwater after dewatering of the open-pit mine. This extreme historical flood in Serbia had disastrous economic and social consequences, given that the studied open-pit mine supports more than 25% of Serbia's electric power output. The assessment of the flood wave and its impact on the groundwater regime is an important example of the groundwater system response to an extreme rainfall and flood event. The paper presents the operating algorithm which leads to the approach of assessing the impact of floods on increasing the volume of accumulated groundwater. The paper presents a developed methodology for groundwater level status exploration in the wider area of open-pit mine Tamnava-West Field during the flooding that occurred in this mine. The developed method encompasses the creation and calibration of a groundwater model and fate and transport model for groundwater state prior to the flooding, a verification model for groundwater level during the extreme floods and a control verification model which corresponds to the period after the passing of the flood wave. The applied operational algorithm offers reliable bases for adopting a strategy for groundwater management during floods.

Risk Assessment of Flood Disaster Induced by Typhoon Rainstorms in Guangdong Province, China

“…Early studies on disaster risk assessment methods mainly focused on qualitative assessment methods, but due to the uncertainty of disaster assessment, the qualitative assessment could not meet the research needs; thus research gradually moved from qualitative methods to a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, or fully quantitative methods [17][18][19][20]. At present, risk assessments are based on four main methods: (1) Mathematical statistics, a method usually used to calculate the intensity and frequency of disaster occurrence from historical disaster data and loss data [21,22]; (2) an indicators system, which usually selects reasonable disaster indicators and determines the weight of each indicator to build a risk assessment model and then conduct a comprehensive risk assessment [8,[23][24][25][26]; (3) RS-GIS technique, in which the satellite remote sensing data are processed and analyzed to determine the flood area and disaster high-risk area with the help of GIS technology [27,28]; and (4) scenario simulation, a method that conducts hydrological and hydrodynamic models to simulate flood scenarios [29][30][31]. Lots of studies show that the second disaster risk assessment method can reflect the regional risk situation on a macro level, and it has been widely applied because it is simple to conduct.…”

Anthropic Constraint Dynamics in European Western Mediterranean Floodplains Related to Floods Events

“…River flooding is strongly dependent upon complex catchment characteristics and land use patterns [9][10][11]. Indeed, the frequency and magnitude of river floods have changed in the past several decades in some regions, with impacts across human and natural systems [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Analyses of in situ streamflow measurements showed both increases and decreases in the frequency of river floods during 1960-2020 in Europe [24][25][26], as well decreases or variability in some areas in the Mediterranean [27,28].…”

Differential Semi-Quantitative Urban Risk Assessment of Storm Surge Inundation

“…Statistical methods extract patterns based on a large amount of historical data. It can distinctly illustrate a hazard-affected region (Polomčić et al, 2018). The indicator methods evaluate the hazard based on the analysis of the diversity influence factors.…”