Abstract
Nowadays, the development of high-resolution flood hazard models have become feasible at continental and global scale, and their application in developing countries and data-scarce regions can be extremely helpful to increase preparedness of population and reduce catastrophic impacts.The present work describes the development of a novel procedure for global flood hazard mapping, based on the most recent advances in large scale flood modelling. We derive a long-term dataset of daily river discharges from the hydrological simulations of the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS). Streamflow data is downscaled on a high resolution river network and processed to provide the input for local flood inundation simulations, performed with a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model. All flood-prone areas identified along the river network are then merged to create continental flood hazard maps for different return periods at 30′′ resolution. We evaluate the performance of our methodology in several river basins across the globe by comparing simulated flood maps with both official hazard maps and a mosaic of flooded areas detected from satellite images. The evaluation procedure also includes comparisons with the results of other large scale flood models. We further investigate the sensitivity of the flood modelling framework to several parameters and modelling approaches and identify strengths, limitations and possible improvements of the methodology.
Highlights
River floods are recognized as one of the major causes of economic damages and loss of human lives worldwide (European Commission, 2007; UNISDR and CRED, 2015)
We evaluate the performance of our methodology in several river basins across the globe by comparing simulated flood maps with both official hazard maps and a mosaic of flooded areas detected from satellite images
We presented a modelling framework for mapping flood hazard at global scale, which is designed by taking into account the most recent advances in large scale flood modelling
Summary
River floods are recognized as one of the major causes of economic damages and loss of human lives worldwide (European Commission, 2007; UNISDR and CRED, 2015). Streamflow data were downscaled and used as input for the LISFLOOD-FP model to compute local flood maps, which were merged into a pan-European flood hazard map Another global flood model has been developed for the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR). We use official flood hazard maps as a reference, and we compare the performance of the produced maps against the results obtained by other global models (Alfieri et al, 2013; Winsemius et al, 2016; Sampson et al, 2015) Where official maps are not available, we produce basin-scale flood extent maps derived for the period 2000-2013, and we compare these maps with a mosaic of flooded areas detected from satellite images for the same reference period. Future applications and developments of the methodology are presented
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