Rapid surface water intervention performance comparison for urban planning

Abstract

Surface water flooding can be a significant source of damage and disruption in urban areas. The complexity of urban surfaces, the need for spatially disaggregated approaches and the multiplicity of interventions makes management challenging from a number of perspectives. This research responds to the challenge of selecting appropriate surface water management interventions by applying a fast assessment framework to generate evidence for comparing strategies at low resource cost during initial design. This is demonstrated by simulating flood dynamics and comparing damage costs during 144 flood scenarios. The main finding of this work is that a high level quantitative assessment of large numbers of scenarios is capable of providing evidence to identify performance trends and consider resilience to extreme events at an early stage of planning.