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Urban Flooding

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Flash Floods

Abstract

In urban areas, significant amounts of surface water runoff can occur during heavy rainfall or rapid snowmelt, leading to flash floods if the drainage network has insufficient capacity. When floods occur, the severity depends on a wide range of factors including the topography, urban landscape and pre-existing flows in the surface and sub-surface drainage networks. There are sometimes also interactions with the flows in rivers which pass through the area. Given this complexity, the provision of flash flood warnings is often a challenge and the methods which are used range from rainfall depth-duration thresholds to real-time hydrodynamic models. This chapter provides an introduction to these topics and to the methods used to assess the risk from flash flooding.

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Correspondence to Kevin Sene .

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Sene, K. (2013). Urban Flooding. In: Flash Floods. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5164-4_10

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