Recent decades have seen a rapid surge in damages and disruptions caused by flooding.
Recent decades have seen a rapid surge in damages and disruptions caused by flooding. In a commentary article published today in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom – the latter also executives of U.K. flood risk intelligence firm Fathom – call on scientists to more accurately model these risks and caution against overly dramatized reporting of future risks in the news media.
In the paper, the researchers urge the climate science community to turn away from an outdated approach to mapping flood hazards known as “bathtub modeling,” which is an assumption that floods spread out over areas as a level pool. The technique is often used as a straightforward way to visualize flood impact in coastal areas but, according to the authors, can lead to an oversimplified and less realistic picture of flood risk than more advanced methods. The alternative to bathtub modeling, they say, is dynamical modeling that solves physics-based equations.
“Bathtub models can both overpredict and underpredict flooding,” said co-author Brett Sanders, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of civil & environmental engineering. “One of the biggest causes of error is that bathtub models fail to accurately account for the systems in place to protect people and assets, including storm drains, levees and pumping.”
Read more at University of California - Irvine
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