Urban rainfall-runoff flooding response for development activities in new urbanized areas based on a novel distributed coupled model

Abstract

The development and construction activities of new urbanized areas lead to drastic changes in land use, resulting in severe flood disasters. The main purpose is to systematically reveal the response process to urban stormwater under different urban development degree (DD) and low-impact development (LID) implementation. A novel distributed hydrological and hydrodynamic coupled model (DHHCM), consisting of a sub-catchment-based hydrological method for plot areas and a grid-based hydrodynamic method for road areas was developed in this study. The Fengxi New Town, China was applied as the research object, a total of 11 combined events of DDs (0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100%) and LID deployment were simulated under five rainfall return periods (P = 2a, 5a, 30a,50a and 100a) to explore their impact on the flood process. The results indicated that the DD and the LID implementation have no obvious impact on road flood when P ≤ 5a. However, the road flood increases significantly with the increase of DD when P ≥ 30a. The peak discharge of the drainage system significantly increases with the increase in DD under different return periods, and the average peak discharge increases the most obviously (2.62 m3/s) under P = 30a. The implementation of LID measures has significantly improved the mitigation effect of surface inundation, drainage system discharge and runoff control, and its effect has increased with the DD increase. It is with great significance to accurately control the flood disaster evolution process in urban development activities, and provide data and technical support for quantifying the risks and losses in policy making.