Archive | 2021
Editorial: Smart Approaches to Predict Urban Flooding: Current Advances and Challenges
Abstract
Urban flooding induced by cloudburst has caused widespread disruption, damages, and environmental impact worldwide. In the context of climate change and rapid urbanization, it is expected that urban flooding will increase in both severity and frequency in the future (IPCC, 2013). In urban areas, concentration of populations, dense properties, key infrastructure systems, and businesses make flood impact be particularly severe, including both direct damage and indirect consequences such as loss of productivity and business opportunities. In addition, the potential risk to public health associated with exposure to contaminants due to urban flooding has also been increasingly recognized worldwide (Van der Vliet et al., 2014; Sales-Ortells and Medema, 2015). Urban flooding and their complex interaction with social and engineering systems impose great challenges on the conventional approaches both to short-term forecasting for emergency response and long-term planning for climate adaptation. There are clear technical challenges and knowledge gaps in understanding and predicting rainfall-induced urban flooding and the associated processes, e.g., pollutant transport. This Research Topic compiles 11 contributions covering topics related to enhancing capability for urban flood modeling, the importance of data support in urban flood modeling, as well as the improved understanding of the fundamental urban runoff dynamics and associated processes. The papers report new approaches and demonstrate how urban flooding and associated runoff quality issues can be reasonably modeled and understood.