New Concepts and Tools for Increasing Resilience to Urban Flood Risks

A better understanding of hydrologic science becomes crucial for the future resilience of our cities

As climate change and urbanization intensify extreme floods worldwide, a better understanding of hydrologic science becomes crucial for the future resilience of our cities. Dr. Claudio Meier and his recent Ph.D. graduate, Francesco Dell’Aira, in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, are pioneering innovative methods to assess how land development impacts flood generation. During his Ph.D., Dell’Aira created a GIS-based framework to analyze how urbanization exacerbates flood risks, as it increases surface hydrologic connectivity by locally reducing infiltration losses and runoff travel times. This methodology enables automated, hydrologically driven analyses of geospatial data layers, from elevation models (DEMs) to soil and vegetation types, all crucial for characterizing the land phase of a watershed’s hydrologic cycle, more specifically its flood response.

Now, in two recently awarded research grants, one from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) for the project “Connectivity-Based Framework for Prioritizing the Location of Stormwater Control Interventions in Urban Watersheds”, and the second from the U.S. Geological Survey for the project “Leveraging Geospatial Data to Explain Urbanization Effects on Flood Response with the Hydrologic-Connectivity-Based Index of Urbanization HCIU”, totaling $550k, Meier and Dell’Aira are going to further apply connectivity-based hydrologic descriptors, to address a spectrum of other societally relevant key water issues. In the TDEC project, they will pursue the optimal implementation of distributed stormwater control measures, in ways that maximize the resulting hydrologic disconnection of developed land from nearby streams and rivers. This work includes developing a methodology for prioritizing areas of intervention for flood mitigation in the Nonconnah Creek basin and then releasing a general software that TDEC can use for applications to other case-study areas in Tennessee. The second, federally funded project involves collaboration with two groups of USGS scientists; it aims at deploying new hydrologic-connectivity-based descriptors to better represent the flooding response of any basin, and then incorporating these findings into the USGS’s StreamStats web application, used by engineers, hydrologists, and researchers nationwide. Implementing the new methodologies proposed by Dell’Aira and Meier will enhance our flood prediction capabilities, help mitigate flood risks and, contingent upon further research, will benefit a broader spectrum of water management applications.

 For more information on these projects, contact Dr. Claudio Meier at cimeier@memphis.edu.