Abstract
Surface runoff determination in urban areas is crucial to facilitate ex ante water planning, especially in the context of climate and land cover changes, which are increasing the frequency of floods, due to a combination of violent storms and increased imperviousness. To this end, the spatial identification of urban areas prone to runoff accumulation is essential, to guarantee effective water management in the future. Under these premises, this work sought to produce a tool for automated determination of urban surface runoff using a geographic information systems (GIS). This tool, which was designed as an ArcGIS add-in called ArcDrain, consists of the discretization of urban areas into subcatchments and the subsequent application of the rational method for runoff depth estimation. The formulation of this method directly depends on land cover type and soil permeability, thereby enabling the identification of areas with a low infiltration capacity. ArcDrain was tested using the city of Santander (northern Spain) as a case study. The results achieved demonstrated the accuracy of the tool for detecting high runoff rates and how the inclusion of mitigation measures in the form of sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) and green infrastructure (GI) can help reduce flood hazards in critical zones.
Highlights
Accepted: 18 August 2021Climate change and urban sprawl are increasing the frequency of natural hazards such as landslides, floods, and droughts [1,2]
The evaluation and eventual mitigation of these events is commonly approached with the support of geographic information systems (GIS), which have been highlighted as useful tools to help identify flood prone areas [4,5]
The city council released a Municipal Emergency Plan to account for natural, anthropogenic, and technological risks [49], among which flood risk was one of the main threats identified due to the existence of several areas across the city proving to be especially sensitive to runoff accumulation
Summary
Accepted: 18 August 2021Climate change and urban sprawl are increasing the frequency of natural hazards such as landslides, floods, and droughts [1,2]. The economic and human losses caused by floods have been especially severe during recent years. Following the trends observed during the last two decades, flood events in 2020 were 23% more recurrent and had 18%. Developing tools and methods to support the ex-ante identification of flood prone areas is becoming increasingly crucial for the urban planning of future societies. The evaluation and eventual mitigation of these events is commonly approached with the support of geographic information systems (GIS), which have been highlighted as useful tools to help identify flood prone areas [4,5]. The use of GIS to support surface runoff determination is a recurrent topic in the literature, especially when oriented to flood calculation
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