A system perspective on flood risk in polder drainage canal systems

A major part of the Netherlands is prone to flooding: roughly 60%. Therefore, a large system of flood defences protects the country from flooding. These flood defences are divided into primary and regional flood defence systems. Primary flood defences protect areas against catastrophical flooding events from the sea, big lakes and major rivers,...

River system behaviour along the river IJssel

This master thesis is about the positive effects of river system behaviour along the river IJssel. Due to failure of the flood defences along the IJssel, the protected areas will flood and water will flow out of the river. The discharge in the river will decrease and thus the water level at the downstream ends of the river will also decrease....

Flood risk analysis of embanked river systems: Probabilistic systems approaches for the Rhine and Po rivers

Flood risk analysis focused on small sections or regions of embanked systems ignores the dy-namics of large-scale floods through time and space. Resulting measures are oftentimes inef-ficient due to an over estimation of risk or be-cause they simply transfer risk downstream due to increased localised protection upstream. This present work...

Large-scale stochastic flood hazard analysis applied to the Po River

Reliable hazard analysis is crucial in the flood risk management of river basins. For the floodplains of large, developed rivers, flood hazard analysis often needs to account for the complex hydrology of multiple tributaries and the potential failure of dikes. Estimating this hazard using deterministic methods ignores two major aspects of...

Influence of water level duration on dike breach triggering, focusing on system behaviour hazard analyses in lowland rivers

Hazard analysis is a crucial step in flood risk management, and for large rivers, the effects of breaches need to be taken into account. Hazard analyses that incorporate this overall “system behaviour” have become increasingly popular in flood risk assessment. Methods to perform such analyses often focus on high water levels as a trigger for...

Gulf carriers to the Netherlands: A system change or chance?

Together Amsterdam Airport Schiphol airport and KLM form the largest chunk of the Dutch air transport industry. As the market for air transport in the Netherlands itself is too small, KLM developed a worldwide route network with many transferring passengers. Schiphol facilitates connecting passengers with the best possible experience. During...

Load interdependencies of flood defences

In the Netherlands flood risks are often assessed by using a dike ring approach. This approach has, aside from many advantages, also some disadvantages. The main disadvantage is that, when zooming in on a small area, the effect of the system on that small area and vice versa, is or cannot be accounted for properly. Research has shown that for a...

Effects of river system behaviour on flood risk