Double good news for the SaferPlaces team working on HAZARD modeling: the article “Safer_RAIN: A DEM-Based Hierarchical Filling-&-Spilling Algorithm for Pluvial Flood Hazard Assessment and Mapping across Large Urban Areas”, besides being published by the Journal Water, was also selected as the issue cover story for the month of June 2020. 

The paper describes the innovative pluvial flood model developed within the framework of the EIT Climate-KIC founded research project Saferplaces, and its application to two case studies in Northern Italy.  Due to increasing extreme precipitation events and high concentration of population and assets, the assessment of the vulnerability of urban areas to pluvial flooding under current and future climate and land-use scenarios is of paramount importance. Detailed hydrologic-hydraulic numerical modeling is resource intensive and therefore scarcely suitable for performing consistent hazard assessments across large urban settlements. Towards this aim, and based on the increasing availability of high-resolution DEMs (Digital Elevation Models), a fast-processing DEM-based algorithm accounting for spatially distributed rainfall and infiltration processes was developed. The applications to two case studies in Northern Italy highlight potential and limitations of the algorithm for identifying pluvial flood-hazard hotspots.

The full article is available here.