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A review of flood modeling methods for urban pluvial flood application

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Abstract

Pluvial flood has been increasingly understood as a major threat that has presented a significant risk for many cities worldwide. Regarding flood risk management, flood modeling enables to understand, assess and forecast flood conditions and their impact. Likewise, several hydrodynamic models have been developed and their application has been spread. With respect to effective flood modeling, particularly in urbanized floodplains, the choice of an appropriate method, considering contextual requirements, is challenging. This paper gives an overview of prevailing flood modeling approaches in view of their potentials and limitations for modeling pluvial flood in urban settings. The existing methods are categorized into: rapid flood spreading, one-dimensional sewer, overland flow (1D and 2D), sewer-surface coupling approaches (1D–1D and 1D–2D). Each of these techniques is described, by taking aspects influencing the selection of a proper flood modeling method for a particular application into account. This paper would help urban flood managers, and potential users undertake effective flood modeling tasks, balancing between their needs, model complexity and requirements of both input data and time.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is a part of ongoing PhD dissertation by Dejene Tesema Bulti at Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC), Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their genuine comments and corrections which helps the paper to be in its present form.

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  1. Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction, and City Development, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

    Dejene Tesema Bulti & Birhanu Girma Abebe

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  1. Dejene Tesema Bulti
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DTB has conceived of the study and made contributions in design, analysis, interpretation of the results and drafted the manuscript. BGA supervised the study and reviewed the whole content. Both authors read and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Dejene Tesema Bulti.

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Bulti, D.T., Abebe, B.G. A review of flood modeling methods for urban pluvial flood application. Model. Earth Syst. Environ. 6, 1293–1302 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-020-00803-z

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