Abstract
Flood hazard is assessed for a watershed with scarce hydrological data in the lower plain of Northern Italy, where the current defense system is inadequate to protect a highly populated urban area located at a river confluence and crossed by numerous bridges. An integrated approach is adopted. Firstly, to overcome the scarcity of data, a regional flood frequency analysis is performed to derive synthetic design hydrographs, with an original approach to obtain the flow reduction curve from recorded water stages. The hydrographs are then imposed as upstream boundary conditions for hydraulic modeling using the fully 2D shallow water model PARFLOOD with the recently proposed inclusion of bridges. High-resolution simulations of the potential flooding in the urban center and surrounding areas are, therefore, performed as a novel extensive application of a truly 2D framework for bridge modeling. Moreover, simulated flooded areas and water levels, with and without bridges, are compared to quantify the interference of the crossing structures and to assess the effectiveness of a structural measure for flood hazard reduction, i.e., bridge adaptation. This work shows how the use of an integrated hydrological–hydraulic approach can be useful for infrastructure design and civil protection purposes in a poorly gauged watershed.
Highlights
Among the most frequent and destructive disasters, floods annually hit people in many countries all over the world
Whatever type of model is used for the purpose, a key element in flood risk assessment is the identification of the hydrological stresses to be adopted as input
Four flooding scenarios were considered, adopting as inflow boundary conditions the synthetic design hydrographs estimated for T = 20, 50, 200, and 500 years
Summary
Among the most frequent and destructive disasters, floods annually hit people in many countries all over the world. Recent studies investigated the possibility to implement this approach in GPU-accelerated numerical codes [44], and the validations performed provided good results, both in low- and high-flow conditions for bridges, without affecting the performance of the calculation tools. It is, very important to preserve the computational efficiency of the numerical codes, both with a view to effectively simulate flooding phenomena on very extensive computing domains and to achieve efficient and accurate 2D simulations in ever shorter calculation times.
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