Spatial Patterns of Urban Development from Optimization of Flood Peaks and Imperviousness-Based Measures

Abstract

Urban development within a watershed can take on a wide and diverse range of spatial patterns. The terms “sprawl” and “clustered” development, for example, are frequent in the literature, spanning the spectrum of possible spatial patterns of urban development. The relationship between flood conditions and the spatial distribution of the urban development has been poorly studied, often because of limitations in streamflow data availability or the common use of lumped watershed models in urban hydrologic modeling. We study this relationship with an optimization-based approach that accounts directly for the spatial distribution of imperviousness to investigate how the urban spatial pattern will affect flood peaks and how it can be used to reduce or minimize undesirable impacts to water resources. We employ several water resources-based objective functions to perform optimizations that result in distinct spatial patterns of urbanization showing characteristics of both sprawl and clustered development, dependi...