Abstract
Ice-jam floods pose a serious threat to many riverside communities in cold regions. Ice-jam-related flooding can cause loss of human life, millions of dollars in property damage, and adverse impacts on ecology. An effective flood management strategy is necessary to reduce the overall risk in flood-prone areas. Most of these strategies require a detailed risk-based management study to assess their effectiveness in reducing flood risk. Zoning regulation is a sustainable measure to reduce overall flood risk for a flood-prone area. Zoning regulation is a specified area in a floodplain where certain restrictions apply to different land uses (e.g., development or business). A stochastic framework was introduced to evaluate the effectiveness of a potential zoning regulation. A stochastic framework encompasses the impacts of all the possible expected floods instead of a more traditional approach where a single design flood is incorporated. The downtown area of Fort McMurray along the Athabasca River was selected to explore the impact of zoning regulation on reducing expected annual damages (EAD) from ice-jam flooding. The results show that a hypothetical zoning regulation for a certain area in the town of Fort McMurray (TFM) can be effective in substantially reducing the level of EAD. A global sensitivity analysis was also applied to understand the impacts of model inputs on ice-jam flood risk using a regional sensitivity method. The results show that model boundary conditions such as river discharge, the inflowing volume of ice and ice-jam toe locations are highly sensitive to ice-jam flood risk.
Highlights
An ice jam is a static accumulation of rubble or frazil ice that obstructs the flow of river channels [1]
Ice jams often form during spring ice-cover breakup; they can form during freeze-up and in mid-winter
The calibrated RIVICE model in the Monte-Carlo Analysis (MOCA) framework was initially run using an assumed value of inflowing ice distribution
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The study demonstrates that ice-jam flood risk can be reduced significantly by building a dike at a height of 250 m a.s.l. and implementing artificial breakup at the TFM This current study is an extension of that work and measures the effectiveness of another potential ice-jam flood mitigation measure, zoning regulation. To gain an understanding of the influences of model parameters and boundary conditions on ice-jam flood risk, a global sensitivity analysis (GSA) has been carried out. GSA method, ice-jam flood hazard, there is still a necessity to further our understanding of the impacts has been used to measure the influence of model parameters and boundary conditions of parameters and boundary conditions on floodof risk This that studyhave provides a GSA onmodel river ice model output [35,36]. The recorded water level and flow discharge data from this gauge station was used to establish maximum flow distributions and calibrate the inflowing volume of ice during spring ice-cover breakup for the stochastic modelling inputs
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