Urban pluvial flash flooding (PFF), driven by extreme weather and urban expansion, introduces complex challenges that arise from the dynamic interaction of rainfall hazard, road vulnerability, and traffic exposure. These three critical components must be interconnected to provide a comprehensive prediction of roadway PFF risk. Our integrated approach combines historical data and real-time Waze flood alerts using a simplified physics-based PFF model and hybrid machine learning methods to predict flash flooding risk at the road segment scale. In a Dallas case study with four intersections, we trained multiple models with data from 15 storms and tested on 5 storms. The XGBoost method excels in test precision, while a Random Forest model offers better recall, and both methods outperform Support Vector Machines (SVM). The choice between models depends on factors such as negative class (prediction of unflooded areas) uncertainty and false positive cost (i.e., predicting no flooding incorrectly). For the case study, our approach could boost flood awareness, enhance safety, and improve urban flood management by correctly predicting 73% of risk observations during the test storm events.
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