FloodCitiSense aims at developing an urban pluvial flood early warning service for, but also by citizens and city authorities, building upon the state-of-the-art knowledge, methodologies and smart technologies provided by research units and private companies. FloodCitiSense targets the co-creation of this innovative public service in an urban living lab context with all local actors. This service will reduce the vulnerability of urban areas and citizens to pluvial floods, which occur when heavy rainfall exceeds the capacity of the urban drainage system. Due to their fast onset and localized nature, they cause significant damage to the urban environment and are challenging to manage. Monitoring and management of peak events in cities is typically in the hands of local governmental agencies. Citizens most often just play a passive role as people negatively affected by the flooding, despite the fact that they are often the ‘first responders’ and should therefore be actively involved. The FloodCitiSense project aims at integrating crowdsourced hydrological data, collaboratively monitored by local stakeholders, including citizens, making use of low-cost sensors and web-based technologies, into a flood early warning system. This will enable ‘citizens and cities’ to be better prepared for and better respond to urban pluvial floods. Three European pilot cities are targeted: Brussels – Belgium, Rotterdam – The Netherlands and Birmingham – UK.

Rainfall variability in space and time, in relation to catchment characteristics and model complexity, plays an important role in explaining the sensitivity of hydrological response in urban areas. In this work we present a new approach to classify rainfall variability in space and time and we use this classification to investigate rainfall aggregation effects on urban hydrological response. Nine rainfall events, measured with a dual polarimetric X-Band radar instrument at the CAESAR site (Cabauw Experimental Site for Atmospheric Research, NL), were aggregated in time and space in order to obtain different resolution combinations. The aim of this work was to investigate the influence that rainfall and catchment scales have on hydrological response in urban areas. Three dimensionless scaling factors were introduced to investigate the interactions between rainfall and catchment scale and rainfall input resolution in relation to the performance of the model. Results showed that (1) rainfall classification based on cluster identification well represents the storm core, (2) aggregation effects are stronger for rainfall than flow, (3) model complexity does not have a strong influence compared to catchment and rainfall scales for this case study, and (4) scaling factors allow the adequate rainfall resolution to be selected to obtain a given level of accuracy in the calculation of hydrological response.

The high variability in space and time of rainfall is one of the main aspects that influence hydrological response and generation of pluvial flooding. This phenomenon has a bigger impact in urban areas, where response is usually faster and flow peaks are typically higher, due to the high degree of imperviousness. Previous researchers have investigated sensitivity of urban hydrodynamic models to rainfall space-time resolution as well as interactions with model structure and resolution. They showed that finding a proper match between rainfall resolution and model complexity is important and that sensitivity increases for smaller urban catchment scales. Results also showed high variability in hydrological response sensitivity, the origins of which remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate the interaction between rainfall input variability and model structure and scale at high resolution, i.e. 1-15 minutes in time and 100m to 3 km in space. Apart from studying summary statistics such as relative peak flow errors and coefficient of determination, we look into characteristics of response hydrographs to find explanations for response variability in relation to catchment properties as well storm event characteristics (e.g. storm scale and movement, single-peak versus multi-peak events). The aim is to identify general relations between storm temporal and spatial scale and catchment scale in explaining variability of hydrological response. Analyses are conducted for the Cranbrook catchment (London, UK), using 3 hydrodynamic models set up in InfoWorks ICM: a low resolution semi-distributed (SD1) model, a high resolution semi-distributed (SD2) model and a fully distributed (FD) model. These models represent the spatial variability of the land in different ways: semi-distributed models divide the surface in subcatchments, each of them modelled in a lumped way (51 subcatchment for the S model and 4409 subcatchments for the SD model), while the fully distributed represents the surface with a dense 2D mesh, based on a high resolution Digital Elevation Map. Nine storm events measured by a dual polarimetric X-Band weather radar, located in Cabauw (CAESAR weather station, NL) were used, with original resolution of 100mx100m in space and 1min in time. Results show that the FD model presents a slightly higher sensitivity to spatial rainfall variability than the SD1and SD2 model. Model resolution, however, seems to have a small impact on the sensitivity of model outcomes compared to rainfall variability: intensity and intermittency, as well as spatial range and velocity, have a higher influence than model configuration.