A high-resolution global flood hazard model

Floods are a natural hazard that affect communities worldwide, but to date the vast majority of flood hazard research and mapping has been undertaken by wealthy developed nations. As populations and economies have grown across the developing world, so too has demand from governments, businesses, and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Water resources research Vol. 51; no. 9; pp. 7358 - 7381
Main Authors: Sampson, Christopher C., Smith, Andrew M., Bates, Paul D., Neal, Jeffrey C., Alfieri, Lorenzo, Freer, Jim E.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.09.2015
John Wiley & Sons, Inc
John Wiley and Sons Inc
Subjects:
Computational Geophysics
Datasets
Developed countries
Extreme Events
Flood control
Flood hazards
flooding
Floods
global
hydraulic
Hydrological
Hydrology
Informatics
large-scale modeling
Model Verification and Validation
Modeling
Natural Hazards
Physical Modeling
Urban areas
ANW, Canada
British Isles
flooding
global
hydraulic
large‐scale modeling
ISSN:0043-1397, 1944-7973
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Floods are a natural hazard that affect communities worldwide, but to date the vast majority of flood hazard research and mapping has been undertaken by wealthy developed nations. As populations and economies have grown across the developing world, so too has demand from governments, businesses, and NGOs for modeled flood hazard data in these data‐scarce regions. We identify six key challenges faced when developing a flood hazard model that can be applied globally and present a framework methodology that leverages recent cross‐disciplinary advances to tackle each challenge. The model produces return period flood hazard maps at ∼90 m resolution for the whole terrestrial land surface between 56°S and 60°N, and results are validated against high‐resolution government flood hazard data sets from the UK and Canada. The global model is shown to capture between two thirds and three quarters of the area determined to be at risk in the benchmark data without generating excessive false positive predictions. When aggregated to ∼1 km, mean absolute error in flooded fraction falls to ∼5%. The full complexity global model contains an automatically parameterized subgrid channel network, and comparison to both a simplified 2‐D only variant and an independently developed pan‐European model shows the explicit inclusion of channels to be a critical contributor to improved model performance. While careful processing of existing global terrain data sets enables reasonable model performance in urban areas, adoption of forthcoming next‐generation global terrain data sets will offer the best prospect for a step‐change improvement in model performance. Key Points: High‐resolution flood hazard model that employs globally available data sets Quantitative assessment of model performance relative to benchmark local data Performance adequate for certain real world applications in data‐scarce regions
Bibliography:istex:D752F1E4AB4E37F0A4EF018432D4794F1A3FEBAE
ArticleID:WRCR21667
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Combined Award in Science and Engineering - No. NE/H017836/1
ark:/67375/WNG-DD3C4PNS-Z
This article was corrected on 2 Nov 2015. See the end of the full text for details.
NERC - No. NE/M007766/1
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ISSN:0043-1397
1944-7973
DOI:10.1002/2015WR016954