Global projections of extreme flood inundation depth and extent under climate change
Abstract
More than 100 million people live in a 100-year floodplain world-wide. Understanding the behavior of floodplains under a changing climate is of paramount importance for flood risk planning and management. Yet, global flood hazard models often focus on either projecting river streamflow or estimating flood inundation depth under the current climate. Global floodplains under climate change have not been studied enough largely because of the high computational expenses associated with high-resolution inundation mapping. Here we estimate global flood inundation projections under climate change at a 90 meters resolution. We use a global high-resolution digital elevation model and a calibrated homogenous geomorphological floodplain delineation model and estimate 100-, 200-, and 500-year flood inundation depth and extent over the globe. We take into account the relative changes in streamflow projections from climate models to project the flood inundation maps throughout the century. To tackle the computational expenses, we use Jupiter Intelligence's cloud computing infrastructure. We validate our results with coarser-resolution inundation maps derived from dynamic models. Validation results confirm the validity of the flood extents and depths. These current and future inundation estimates are useful for international flood risk management and mitigation planning.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMH214...02Z
- Keywords:
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- 1821 Floods;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1855 Remote sensing;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 4333 Disaster risk analysis and assessment;
- NATURAL HAZARDS