DeltaDTM: A global coastal digital terrain model

Coastal elevation data are essential for a wide variety of applications, such as coastal management, flood modelling, and adaptation planning. Low-lying coastal areas (found below 10 m +Mean Sea Level (MSL)) are at risk of future extreme water levels, subsidence and changing extreme weather patterns. However, current freely available elevation...

A Flood Risk Framework Capturing the Seasonality of and Dependence Between Rainfall and Sea Levels—An Application to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

State-of-the-art flood hazard maps in coastal cities are often obtained from simulating coastal or pluvial events separately. This method does not account for the seasonality of flood drivers and their mutual dependence. In this article, we include the impact of these two factors in a computationally efficient probabilistic framework for...

The benefits of coastal adaptation through conservation of foreshore vegetation

Due to rising sea levels and projected socio-economic change, global coastal flood risk is expected to increase in the future. To reduce this increase in risk, one option is to reduce the probability or magnitude of the hazard through the implementation of structural, Nature-based or hybrid adaptation measures. Nature-based Solutions in...

A hydrography upscaling method for scale-invariant parametrization of distributed hydrological models

Distributed hydrological models rely on hydrography data such as flow direction, river length, slope and width. For large-scale applications, many of these models still rely on a few flow direction datasets, which are often manually derived. We propose the Iterative Hydrography Upscaling (IHU) method to upscale high-resolution flow direction...

Cutting the costs of coastal protection by integrating vegetation in flood defences

Exposure to coastal flooding is increasing due to growing population and economic activity. These developments go hand-in-hand with a loss and deterioration of ecosystems. Ironically, these ecosystems can play a buffering role in reducing flood hazard. The ability of ecosystems to contribute to reducing coastal flooding has been emphasized in...

Measuring compound flood potential from river discharge and storm surge extremes at the global scale

The interaction between physical drivers from oceanographic, hydrological, and meteorological processes in coastal areas can result in compound flooding. Compound flood events, like Cyclone Idai and Hurricane Harvey, have revealed the devastating consequences of the co-occurrence of coastal and river floods. A number of studies have recently...

Global-scale benefit-cost analysis of coastal flood adaptation to different flood risk drivers using structural measures

<p>Coastal flood hazard and exposure are expected to increase over the course of the 21st century, leading to increased coastal flood risk. In order to limit the increase in future risk, or even reduce coastal flood risk, adaptation is necessary. Here, we present a framework to evaluate the future benefits and costs of structural protection...

Comparison of estimates of global flood models for flood hazard and exposed gross domestic product: A China case study

Over the past decade global flood hazard models have been developed and continuously improved. There is now a significant demand for testing global hazard maps generated by these models in order to understand their applicability for international risk reduction strategies and for reinsurance portfolio risk assessments using catastrophe models...

The effect of surge on riverine flood hazard and impact in deltas globally

Current global riverine flood risk studies assume a constant mean sea level boundary. In reality high sea levels can propagate up a river, impede high river discharge, thus leading to elevated water levels. Riverine flood risk in deltas may therefore be underestimated. This paper presents the first global scale assessment of the joint...

Evaluating the impact of model complexity on flood wave propagation and inundation extent with a hydrologic-hydrodynamic model coupling framework

Fluvial flood events are a major threat to people and infrastructure. Typically, flood hazard is driven by hydrologic or river routing and floodplain flow processes. Since they are often simulated by different models, coupling these models may be a viable way to increase the integration of different physical drivers of simulated inundation...

Dependence between high sea-level and high river discharge increases flood hazard in global deltas and estuaries

When river and coastal floods coincide, their impacts are often worse than when they occur in isolation; such floods are examples of ‘compound events’. To better understand the impacts of these compound events, we require an improved understanding of the dependence between coastal and river flooding on a global scale. Therefore, in this letter,...

Predicting the ungauged basin: Model validation and realism assessment

The hydrological decade on Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB) led to many new insights in model development, calibration strategies, data acquisition and uncertainty analysis. Due to a limited amount of published studies on genuinely ungauged basins, model validation and realism assessment of model outcome has not been discussed to a great...

Remotely sensed monitoring of small reservoir dynamics: A Bayesian approach

Multipurpose small reservoirs are important for livelihoods in rural semi-arid regions. To manage and plan these reservoirs and to assess their hydrological impact at a river basin scale, it is important to monitor their water storage dynamics. This paper introduces a Bayesian approach for monitoring small reservoirs with radar satellite images....

Remotely sensed small reservoir monitoring

An analytical framework for extracting hydrological information from time series of small reservoirs in a semi-arid region