Comparison of Flood Inundation Modeling Frameworks within a Small Coastal Watershed during a Compound Flood Event

Abstract

Abstract. The flooding brought about by compound coastal flooding can be devastating. Before, during, and immediately following these events, flood inundation maps, or Events Maps, can provide essential information to emergency management. However, there are a number of frameworks capable of estimating Event Maps during flood events. In this article, we evaluate three such Event Map frameworks in the context of Hurricane Harvey. Our analysis reveals that each of the three frameworks provide different inundation maps that differ in their level of accuracy. Each of the three Event Maps also produce different exposure and consequence estimates because of their physical differences. This investigation highlights the need for a centralized means of vetting and adjudicating multiple Event Maps during compound flood events empowered by the ability to distribute Event Maps as geographic information system (GIS) services and coalesce Event Maps into a common operating picture. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the ability to produce multi-model estimates of Events Maps to create probabilistic Event Maps may provide a better product than the use of a lone Event Map.

Recent Advances and New Frontiers in Riverine and Coastal Flood Modeling

“…While the majority of the existing literature is based on a one-way coupling approach (Bakhtyar et al, 2020;Gutenson et al, 2021Gutenson et al, , 2022Santiago-Collazo et al, 2019;F. Ye et al, 2020), only a few studies have implemented loosely coupled (H. P. Cheng et al, 2010;Gori, Lin, & Smith, 2020), tightly coupled (Bilskie et al, 2021;Eilander et al, 2020) or fully coupled (Leijnse et al, 2021) modeling frameworks for coastal flood inundation mapping.…”

“…Depending on the joining technique to be implemented, coupling falls under one of the following categories: (a) one‐way coupling: flux transfer allowed from one model to another, (b) loosely coupled: two‐way coupling with information exchange allowed between separately running models in an iterative way, (c) tightly coupled: at which source code of independent models are integrated under a single modeling framework, (d) fully coupled: under which governing equations are solved simultaneously within the same modeling framework (Santiago‐Collazo et al., 2019). While the majority of the existing literature is based on a one‐way coupling approach (Bakhtyar et al., 2020; Gutenson et al., 2021, 2022; W. Huang et al., 2021; Santiago‐Collazo et al., 2019; F. Ye et al., 2020), only a few studies have implemented loosely coupled (H. P. Cheng et al., 2010; Gori, Lin, & Smith, 2020), tightly coupled (Bilskie et al., 2021; Eilander et al., 2020) or fully coupled (Leijnse et al., 2021) modeling frameworks for coastal flood inundation mapping.…”