SOFRAMODE CoE

Improving resilience to flood events and storm overflows requires a cross-disciplinary approach to understand: the hazard and stress it causes – how to be aware of it, to prevent it and prepare for it; future uncertainty in climate and socioeconomic conditions – access to appropriate and timely information, incorporate adaptive capacity; diversity of livelihoods it may affect – take account of community organisation, promote sustainable management, ensure secure living; governance i.e. the enabling environment to encourage an integrated approach to managing the hazard.

Using DAFNI, Vassilis Glenis from Newcastle University, aims to develop and demonstrate a state-of-the-art platform for understanding and simulating urban drainage related to surface water flooding and high-profile storm overflow events, for any UK town or city.

The scenarios will encompass a wide range of current and future rainfall event magnitudes and provide functionality for consultants and industry, as well as researchers, to design and test a range of strategies to mitigate Storm Overflow spills and surface water flooding. This project will develop a tool building upon the CityCAT hydrodynamic flood modelling system developed at Newcastle University which provides capability for accurate and fast modelling of combined pluvial and fluvial flood risk. CityCAT provides a significant advance on commercial codes as it is not only computationally efficient, but it can account for the effects of permeable and impermeable ground surfaces, buildings, blue-green roofs, sub-surface drainage networks, water butts and storage ponds. The model uses readily available data. To test solutions to reduce flood risk and future climate conditions, surface properties can be altered to model more permeable surfaces, i.e. green-areas or storage ponds, and, simulations of different flood events can be driven by various rainfall profiles to represent a wide range of storm durations and return periods. CityCAT has been successfully validated against a number of real world events in cities as well as the most stringent benchmark test used in industry, and trialled and taken up by researchers and industry specialists in the UK, Europe and globally. The development of this tool will improve resilience, understanding, preparedness and response to flooding and spills by improving the characterisation of the hazard and enhancing a range of stakeholder’s understanding of the potential impacts of the hazards in urban areas and catchments. It will therefore be of benefit to researchers working in hydraulics, climatology, hydrology, flood risk assessment, economics, ethnographic studies, understanding governance and policy,
and behaviour change.