Urban Flood Area Delimitation Using Reverse Water Local Flow Paths

Abstract

South America is vulnerable to flood disasters, which must be prevented and managed, especially in the urban area close to the rivers. Different terrain descriptors (e.g. hydrographic network, altimetry) are taken into consideration to identify area with potential risk of flooding. INPE has developed tools to process and manage hydrological information. This paper aims to improve such tools proposing a method to study urban flood area delimitation starting from a raster elevation representation of the urban area with high resolution and water level information. In particular, the proposed method considers the water behaviour assuming that water flood happens in the part of the river having altimetry higher than the surrounding surface. The use of such water behaviour information results in the improvement of the accuracy of the study of urban area with risk of flooding.