News release: Nationwide flood models poorly reflect risks to households and properties, study finds
Government agencies, insurance companies and disaster planners rely on national flood risk models from the private sector that aren’t reliable at smaller levels such as neighborhoods and individual properties, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine. In a paper published recently in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future, experts in UC Irvine’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering caution that relatively new, nation-scale flood data provides an inadequate representation of local topography and infrastructure, factors known to control the spread of floods in urban areas. … Sanders and colleagues at UC Irvine and the University of Miami developed a more detailed model named PRIMo-Drain that, they said, improves the accuracy of flood inundation predictions by including fine-resolution topographic data; information about levees and channel conditions; and particulars about stormwater infrastructure such as culverts, subsurface pipes and street drains.