Flood Disaster Risk Simulation in Urban Areas in Chaclacayo district, Peru

Abstract

Many urban areas are vulnerable to hazards produced by natural disasters specially floods that are currently increasing. For this reason, prevention efforts must focus on reducing disaster risks when they happen. These actions are applied to land areas; therefore the geographic data are valuable to improve them, because they give the spatial location of the elements in the terrain. Likewise, the hydrological simulation models provide a perspective of the possible vulnerable areas impacted by floods. In order to achieve the improvement of flood disaster risk prevention activities, we propose a methodology for the hydrological simulation of flood scenarios using HecRAS tool. In this methodology we define the geometrical conditions of the cartographic data, use Gumbel`s distribution method for the processing of hydrological data, and develop the hydrological simulation process applying geomorphological and fluid mechanics parameters. The results of the hydrological simulation and the cartographic data are stored in a flexible geodatabase designed by us, using standards and protocols based on open source, which allows their collection, processing and dissemination. We apply the proposed methodology to a case study and develop the hydrological modeling for three simulation scenarios, to calculate the flooding urban areas in Chaclacayo district located in Peru.