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Assessment of flood risk management in lowland Tokyo areas in the seventeenth century by numerical flow simulations

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Abstract

Numerical simulations using the shallow water model on an unstructured triangular mesh system were conducted to elucidate the hydraulic functions of the Nihon levee system, which was built in the seventeenth century to protect the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) against flooding. Because numerical data related to the topography and hydrology of that era do not exist, simulation conditions were inferred from records from the beginning of twentieth century and recent GIS elevation data and flood records. In the simulation results, floodwaters spread over the floodplain surrounded by the levee system, and the inundation areas expanded gradually through a canal to rice paddies in the adjacent river basin. Furthermore, the rise in the water level induced by the levee system produced a steeper water surface slope in the downstream channel, causing a high-rate discharge to Tokyo Bay, where the water level was practically constant. These results suggest that the river engineering of Japan in the seventeenth century was based on a levee design technique with the aim not of restraining floodwaters with levees but of generating water head differences to divert flood flow from urban areas.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Emeritus Professor Hideo Kikkawa of the Tokyo Institute of Technology for his valuable suggestions pertaining to this study. We would also like to thank the Arakawa-Karyu River Office and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Bureau of Construction for providing field survey data for this study. This study was supported by a Grant from the River Foundation (No. 27-1212-006).

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Correspondence to Tadaharu Ishikawa.

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Ishikawa, T., Akoh, R. Assessment of flood risk management in lowland Tokyo areas in the seventeenth century by numerical flow simulations. Environ Fluid Mech 19, 1295–1307 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10652-018-9616-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10652-018-9616-6

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