Real-Time Early Warning System Design for Pluvial Flash Floods—A Review

Acosta-Coll, Melisa; Ballester-Merelo, Francisco José; Martínez-Peiró, Marcos; De-la-Hoz-Franco, Emiro

doi:10.3390/s18072255

Cited by 97 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…Recently, novel approaches have been developed and evaluated to map areas affected by SWFs [15] and to assess the exposure to these processes [5]. Moreover, first attempts have been made to develop early warning systems for SWF events [16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. However, the development of such early warning systems is challenging.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterizing precipitation events leading to surface water flood damage over large regions of complex terrain

Bernet

Trefalt

Martius

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Surface water floods (SWFs) that lead to household losses are mainly localized phenomena. Research on describing the associated precipitation characteristics has previously been based on case studies and on the derivation of local rainfall thresholds, but no approaches have yet been presented on the national scale. Here, we propose a new way to overcome this scaling problem. We linked a gridded precipitation dataset based on both rainfall gauges and radar data with geolocated insurance claims for all of Switzerland. We show that the absolute thresholds vary markedly over complex terrain, and we thus propose basing early warning systems for predicting damage-relevant SWF events on local quantiles of maximum intensity and the total sum of event precipitation. A threshold model based on these two parameters is able to classify rainfall events potentially leading to damage-relevant SWF events over large areas of complex terrain, including high mountains and lowland areas, and a variety of geological conditions. Our approach is an important step towards the development of impact-based early warning systems. Weather warning agencies or insurance companies can build upon these findings to find workarounds for issuing user-targeted warnings at national scale or for nowcasting purposes.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterizing precipitation events leading to surface water flood damage over large regions of complex terrain

Bernet

Trefalt

Martius

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…Flash floods are natural hazards that are defined as fast surface flows with high peak discharge values, often limited in their spatial extent [1]. The most frequent cause of this type of flood is heavy rainfall events [2], hence the expression pluvial flash flood is used [3,4]. Pluvial flooding occurs when rainfall with a high intensity (high amount of precipitation during a very short period) exceeds the infiltration capacity of soil, or the discharge capacity of sewage and drainage systems, and water flows uncontrolled through urban areas [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk-Based Early Warning System for Pluvial Flash Floods: Approaches and Foundations

Hofmann

Schüttrumpf

2019

Geosciences

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In times of increasing weather extremes and expanding vulnerable cities, a significant risk to civilian security is posed by heavy rainfall induced flash floods. In contrast to river floods, pluvial flash floods can occur anytime, anywhere and vary enormously due to both terrain and climate factors. Current early warning systems (EWS) are based largely on measuring rainfall intensity or monitoring water levels, whereby the real danger due to urban torrential floods is just as insufficiently considered as the vulnerability of the physical infrastructure. For this reason, this article presents a concept for a risk-based EWS as one integral component of a multi-functional pluvial flood information system (MPFIS). Taking both the pluvial flood hazard as well as the damage potential into account, the EWS identifies the urban areas particularly affected by a forecasted heavy rainfall event and issues object-precise warnings in real-time. Further, the MPFIS performs a georeferenced documentation of occurred events as well as a systematic risk analysis, which at the same time forms the foundation of the proposed EWS. Based on a case study in the German city of Aachen and the event of 29 May 2018, the operation principle of the integrated information system is illustrated.

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“…Among the different approaches used to develop flood forecast tools are artificial neural networks [8,9], high-resolution precipitation radars [10][11][12], images and video footages of the water level [13,14], and atmospheric data [15,16]. Flood maps generated using 2D hydrodynamic models are one of the best tools for an efficient management strategy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A 2D Real-Time Flood Forecast Framework Based on a Hybrid Historical and Synthetic Runoff Database

Crotti

Leandro

Bhola

2019

Water

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Operational real-time flood forecast is often done on the prediction of discharges at specific gauges using hydrological models. Hydrodynamic models, which can produce inundation maps, are computationally demanding and often cannot be used directly for that purpose. The FloodEvac framework has been developed in order to enable 2D flood inundations map to be forecasted at real-time. The framework is based on a database of pre-recorded synthetic events. In this paper, the framework is improved by generating a database based on rescaled historical river discharge events. This historical database includes a wider variety of runoff curves, including non-Gaussian and multi-peak shapes that better reflect the characteristics and the behavior of the natural streams. Hence, a hybrid approach is proposed by joining the historical and the existing synthetic database. The increased number of scenarios in the hybrid database allows reliable predictions, thus improving the robustness and applicability of real-time flood forecasts.

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Real-Time Early Warning System Design for Pluvial Flash Floods—A Review

Cited by 97 publications

References 57 publications

Characterizing precipitation events leading to surface water flood damage over large regions of complex terrain

Characterizing precipitation events leading to surface water flood damage over large regions of complex terrain

Risk-Based Early Warning System for Pluvial Flash Floods: Approaches and Foundations

A 2D Real-Time Flood Forecast Framework Based on a Hybrid Historical and Synthetic Runoff Database

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