Advancing Urban Flood Risk Management through Physics-informed, Data-Driven Hazard Assessment

The escalating impacts of climate change, particularly the intensification of rainfall events, pose significant challenges for fast-evolving cities. While numerous flood management strategies exist, from sponge cities and insurance to traditional gray infrastructure, the tools typically used to assess flood hazard, such as floodplain maps and IDF curves, are often inadequate for direct comparisons of these diverse approaches. This talk explores the development of enhanced hazard models as a step towards integrating them into actionable, bottom-up decision-support frameworks. The presentation will focus on leveraging physics, statistics, and machine learning to create robust flood risk management tools, with examples drawn from nonstationary site-scale risk assessment, regional risk assessment, and decision analysis. By integrating these approaches, we can better understand the spatiotemporal evolution of hydroclimate extremes and their interaction with urban systems, contributing to the development of resilient, risk-informed decision-making frameworks for cities facing the challenges of climate change. The talk will conclude with a discussion of ongoing and future work in this field, highlighting the potential for integrating advanced modeling techniques to support flood risk management in evolving urban environments.

Hosted by: Dr. Sebastian