Urban flooding is a growing problem that is of concern to city engineers worldwide. Many cities are situated on major rivers or coasts, and as such are subject to flash flooding from surrounding hills, or extreme rainfall events such as thunderstorms directly on the urban area.

There are increasing concerns about disasters caused by urban floods. Such floods can damage the drainage system and generate landslides, which might lead to extreme pollution in urban areas and streams and even loss of lives.

The management of urban flooding is an emerging subject, and such a topic needs to be treated holistically in a multi-disciplinary manner. It becomes even more urgent with the fact that the migration to urban areas and an on-going development activities continue to be a threat causing an increase in the pressure on the various infrastructure and services provided.

There is an urgent need therefore to reduce the risk of disaster associated with urban flooding. This has to be coupled with better town planning activities, hazard mitigation and prevention, improved preparedness and warning systems, well organised pre-emptive action and emergency response to minimise damages.

A significant part of this management framework is dependent on good monitoring, modelling and decision support. Modelling is a skilled science that is now fortunately becoming widely available, and there is a considerable body of experience being accumulated.

One way of improving the preparation for natural disasters is by setting up different scenarios and analysing their occurrence within a reliable modelling framework in order to identify the most effective actions.

Certainly, there are many issues that need to be considered in order to develop sound and reliable flood/disaster management strategies. Model robustness and accuracy continue to be issues that affect such process, especially when there is a shortage of good temporal and spatial data, and when there is uncertainty in the results.

The main objective of this course is to provide the most up-to-date information on the topic of urban flood modelling and disaster management and to enable participants to be more effective in applying modelling tools and techniques for solving urban flood problems.

Learning objectives

To introduce participants to the development of safe and reliable models for cost-effective, sustainable and environmentally sound operation and management of urban drainage systems.

The course covers the fundamentals of modelling, how to build and apply reliable models of urban drainage systems and how to use apply such models in various aspects of urban flood management. Attention will also be given to the complementary role of monitoring system, GIS, databases and decision support systems.

Target group

The course is designed for professionals (engineers, scientists and practicing engineers) active in the urban water sector, especially those involved in using simulation models for planning of drainage networks and disaster management activities. Participants will be familiar with planning, design, operation and maintenance of urban drainage systems. Pre-requisites are a basic knowledge of hydraulics and systems analysis.

Additional information

The course is designed to cover both theoretical and practical aspects that are necessary to practice safe urban flood modelling and disaster management activities. It contains lectures and exercises based on real-life cases. Through exercises participants will become familiar with at least one modelling software system and will learn how to apply such system for the development of disaster management actions.

Some of the aspects that will be covered in this course are: design of reliable modelling framework that fits specific requirements, design of spatial and temporal data measurement campaigns, setting up of 1D and 1D-2D models, GIS data processing, forecasts of rainfall based on weather radar and ensemble predictions, development and application of real-time flood warning systems, selection of structural and non-structural flood protection measures, key principles of disaster planning, the use of models in evaluation of disaster management actions.