High Resolution Urban Flood Modelling: A Case Study of Cork City, Ireland

10 pages•Published: September 20, 2018

Stephen Nash, Joanne Comer, Agnieszka Olbert and Michael Hartnett

Abstract

Flooding of coastal areas can be caused by a number of contributing factors: high river flows, high tides, storm surges or a combination thereof. This paper presents results of a numerical modelling investigation of the role of river flow in flooding of Cork City. The Cork City urban flood model was developed by dynamically linking a storm surge model of the northeast Atlantic with the multi-scale nested flood model, MSN_Flood, which uses nesting to telescope down from 90m resolution in Cork Harbour to 2m resolution in the city streets. LiDAR data was used to create the urban flood plain. The model is used to hindcast the 2009 major flood event and is shown to accurately recreate the flood levels and extents. The model is then used to investigate the contributions of river flows to flooding in the city by simulating a range of peak flow scenarios combined with spring and neap tidal conditions. It is shown that flooding is relatively minor for peak flows less than 300 m3/s, while peak flows in excess of 500 m3/s result in extensive flooding of the city centre regardless of tidal condition.

Keyphrases: coastal flooding, flood management, flood mechanisms, nested model, urban flood modelling

In: Goffredo La Loggia, Gabriele Freni, Valeria Puleo and Mauro De Marchis (editors). HIC 2018. 13th International Conference on Hydroinformatics, vol 3, pages 1495-1504.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/phQ1
	https://doi.org/10.29007/rzwj

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{HIC2018:High_Resolution_Urban_Flood,
  author    = {Stephen Nash and Joanne Comer and Agnieszka Olbert and Michael Hartnett},
  title     = {High Resolution Urban Flood Modelling: A Case Study of Cork City, Ireland},
  booktitle = {HIC 2018. 13th International Conference on Hydroinformatics},
  editor    = {Goffredo La Loggia and Gabriele Freni and Valeria Puleo and Mauro De Marchis},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Engineering},
  volume    = {3},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2516-2330},
  url       = {/publications/paper/phQ1},
  doi       = {10.29007/rzwj},
  pages     = {1495-1504},
  year      = {2018}}

Download PDF Open PDF in browser