Effect of Compound Flooding on Performance of Earthen Levees

EasyChair Preprint 1549

Abstract

Earthen levees protecting coastal regions can be exposed to compound flooding induced by multiple drivers such as coastal water level, river discharge, and precipitation. However, the majority of flood hazard analyses consider only one flood driver at a time.  This study numerically investigates the performance of an earthen levee in Sherman Island, Sacramento, CA under compound flooding induced by fluvial and pluvial flooding. A finite element model is built for fully coupled 3D stress- flow simulations of the levee. The finite element model is then used to simulate the hydro-mechanical response of the levee under different flood scenarios. Fluvial flood hydrographs for different scenarios are obtained using a bivariate extreme analysis of peak river discharge and peak ocean level while accounting for the significance of correlation between these two variables. Pluvial flooding is characterized using Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves of extreme precipitations for the study area. The fluvial and pluvial flood patterns for different recurrence intervals are used in the finite element model to simulate the hydro-mechanical response of the levee. Results show that considering compound flooding leads to 8.7% and 18.6% reduction in the factor of safety for 2 and 50-year recurrence intervals, respectively.

Keyphrases: Compound flooding, Levees, Resilience

@booklet{EasyChair:1549,
  author    = {Firas Jasim and Farshid Vahedifard and Aneseh Alborzi and Hamed Moftakhari and Amir Aghakouchak},
  title     = {Effect of Compound Flooding on Performance of Earthen Levees},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1549},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}