What Is Nuisance Flooding? Defining and Monitoring an Emerging Challenge

Moftakhari, Hamed; AghaKouchak, Amir; Sanders, Brett F.; Allaire, Maura; Matthew, Richard A.

doi:10.1029/2018wr022828

Cited by 140 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 76 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Minor flooding can cause considerable indirect damages to assets and economic activities in cities, such as business interruption, road closure, traffic disruptions, economic losses, public inconvenience, and long‐term chronic degradation of infrastructure from increasing inundation of saltwater (e.g., Moftakhari et al, ; Sweet et al, ). We do not consider these impacts in the current study.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Coherent Statistical Model for Coastal Flood Frequency Analysis Under Nonstationary Sea Level Conditions

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Flood exposure is increasing in coastal communities due to rising sea levels. Understanding the effects of sea level rise (SLR) on frequency and consequences of coastal flooding and subsequent social and economic impacts is of utmost importance for policymakers to implement effective adaptation strategies. Effective strategies may consider impacts from cumulative losses from minor flooding as well as acute losses from major events. In the present study, a statistically coherent Mixture Normal‐Generalized Pareto Distribution model was developed, which reconciles the probabilistic characteristics of the upper tail as well as the bulk of the sea level data. The nonstationary sea level condition was incorporated in the mixture model using Quantile Regression method to characterize variable Generalized Pareto Distribution thresholds as a function of SLR. The performance validity of the mixture model was corroborated for 68 tidal stations along the Contiguous United States (CONUS) coast with long‐term observed data. The method was subsequently employed to assess existing and future coastal minor and major flood frequencies. The results indicate that the frequency of minor and major flooding will increase along all CONUS coastal regions in response to SLR. By the end of the century, under the “Intermediate” SLR scenario, major flooding is anticipated to occur with return period less than a year throughout the coastal CONUS. However, these changes vary geographically and temporally. The mixture model was reconciled with the property exposure curve to characterize how SLR might influence Average Annual Exposure to coastal flooding in 20 major CONUS coastal cities.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Coherent Statistical Model for Coastal Flood Frequency Analysis Under Nonstationary Sea Level Conditions

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…At regional levels, already high exposure or infrastructure network components including 'three-waters' nodes and pipelines to ESL 100 flooding doubles before reaching a 0.5 m SLR. These modest rises in sea-level will cause more frequent ESL flooding exposure that regularly disrupt or reduce infrastructure service levels within built-areas [43]. This will require adaptation decisions by property owners and communities to proactively manage and plan for the rising and more frequent socio-economic impacts from coastal flooding and SLR.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

National-Scale Built-Environment Exposure to 100-Year Extreme Sea Levels and Sea-Level Rise

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Coastal flooding from extreme sea levels will increase in frequency and magnitude as global climate change forces sea-level rise (SLR). Extreme sea-level events, rare in the recent past (i.e., once per century), are projected to occur at least once per year by 2050 along many of the world's coastlines. Information showing where and how built-environment exposure increases with SLR, enables timely adaptation before damaging thresholds are reached. This study presents a first national-scale assessment of New Zealand's built-environment exposure to future coastal flooding. We use an analytical risk model framework, "RiskScape", to enumerate land, buildings and infrastructure exposed to a present and future 100-year extreme sea-level flood event (ESL 100 ). We used high-resolution topographic data to assess incremental exposure to 0.1 m SLR increases. This approach detects variable rates in the potential magnitude and timing of future flood exposure in response to SLR over decadal scales. National built-land and asset exposure to ESL 100 flooding doubles with less than 1 m SLR, indicating low-lying areas are likely to experience rapid exposure increases from modest increases in SLR expected within the next few decades. This highlights an urgent need for national and regional actions to anticipate and adaptively plan to reduce future socio-economic impacts arising from flood exposure to extreme sea-levels and SLR.

show abstract

“…In particular, a relatively low threshold of between 3 and 10-cm water depth was recently suggested by Moftakhari et al (2018) to describe nuisance flooding. In particular, a relatively low threshold of between 3 and 10-cm water depth was recently suggested by Moftakhari et al (2018) to describe nuisance flooding.…”

Section: Overall Performance Of Topographic Indices For Indicating mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Though thresholds for urban TWI have been less investigated, there is an extensive literature describing water depths that may be regarded as nuisance flooding. In particular, a relatively low threshold of between 3 and 10-cm water depth was recently suggested by Moftakhari et al (2018) to describe nuisance flooding. This draws into question the idea of defining a single sink depth that may be a proxy for areas prone to nuisance flooding and suggests instead that if a sink depth is "detectable" (e.g., exceeds the vertical accuracy of a DEM), it may represent an area that is nuisance flooding prone.…”

Section: Overall Performance Of Topographic Indices For Indicating mentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the application of topographic indices in urban areas as indicators of pluvial flooding locations

Kelleher

McPhillips

2019

Hydrological Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In urban areas, the presence of impervious surfaces limits natural drainage and routes water to stormwater infrastructure with finite capacity, making these areas especially prone to flooding. Though large floods are responsible for endangering lives and causing extensive damage, there is growing evidence that more frequent floods with shallow water depths, termed nuisance flooding, can have a high cumulative cost and many direct and indirect damages. To determine whether locations of nuisance flooding may be linked to topography, we took a parsimonious, spatially distributed approach to explore whether high topographic index values co-occur with citizenreported nuisance flooding. We obtained nuisance flood reports from the municipal data service 311 for several watersheds in New York City and Baltimore, USA. Our analysis tested two topographic indices (TI)-topographic wetness index (TWI) and sink depth-both calculated from high-resolution (~1 m) digital elevation models.Generally, our findings suggest that not all but many locations of reported flooding tend to coincide with deep sinks or large TWI. However, nuisance flooding reports most commonly coincided with deep sinks and high TWI when using a maximum, instead of coincident, TI value extracted around each reported location of flooding, an approach we used due to the uncertainty in location accuracy of flooding reports.Overall, our results show promise for application of topographic indices, typically applied in more natural settings, as indicators of nuisance flooding areas in urbanized environments. Although limitations to this approach exist, the application of TIs and crowd-sourced reporting in tandem could provide a useful starting point for mapping flood-prone areas in many cities with technologically adept community members and ample geospatial data. K E Y W O R D Scrowd-sourced data, nuisance flooding, pluvial flooding, spatial indicators, topographic indices, urban hydrology

show abstract

What Is Nuisance Flooding? Defining and Monitoring an Emerging Challenge

Cited by 140 publications

References 76 publications

A Coherent Statistical Model for Coastal Flood Frequency Analysis Under Nonstationary Sea Level Conditions

A Coherent Statistical Model for Coastal Flood Frequency Analysis Under Nonstationary Sea Level Conditions

National-Scale Built-Environment Exposure to 100-Year Extreme Sea Levels and Sea-Level Rise

Exploring the application of topographic indices in urban areas as indicators of pluvial flooding locations

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About