Traditional stormwater control measures are designed to handle system
loadings induced by fixed-size storm events. However, climate change is
predicted to alter the frequency and intensity of flooding events,
stimulating the need to explore another more adaptive flooding solution
like real-time control (RTC). This study assesses the performance of RTC
to mitigate impacts of climate change on urban flooding resilience. A
simulated, yet realistic, urban drainage system in Salt Lake City, Utah,
USA, shows that RTC improves the flooding resilience by up to 17% under
climatic rainfall changes. Compared with green stormwatrer
infrastructure (GSI), RTC exhibits a lower resistibility, lower flooding
failure level, and higher recovery rate in system performance curves.
Results articulate that keeping RTC’s performance consistent under
‘back-to-back’ storms requires a tradeoff between upstream dynamical
operation and downstream flooding functionality loss. This research
suggests that RTC provides a new path towards smart and resilient
stormwater management strategy.