The structure of streets and the arrangement of buildings play a crucial role in determining how well a city can withstand severe flooding, which is becoming more frequent due to climate change. Researchers are examining buildings and urban elements similarly to how physicists analyze components in complex material systems. This perspective has led to a fresh approach in modeling urban flood risks, providing valuable insights into variations in flood dangers across different cities worldwide.
Cities all over the world are facing heightened flooding issues due to more intense storms resulting from climate change and increasing urbanization. Recent research from the University of California, Irvine indicates that the layout of a city, particularly building density and the street network within neighborhoods, influences the severity of flooding.
In a study published today in Nature Communications, experts from UC Irvine’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering applied statistical mechanics to create a new formula that will aid urban planners in evaluating flood risks associated with changes in land development.
Mohammad Javad Abdolhosseini Qomi, an associate professor at UC Irvine’s Civil and Environmental Engineering department and a joint faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, noted that he and his team drew inspiration from physics researchers examining complex systems like disordered porous solids and complex fluids to develop universal theories that can clarify differences in flood risks between cities.
“Utilizing statistical mechanics has allowed us to create an analytical model that can predict flood hazards at a neighborhood level globally,” Qomi explained. “We can explore the variations in flood hazards among different cities. The platform we developed demonstrates correlations between urban form, flood losses, and extreme rainfall occurrences.”
Sarah Balaian, the lead author and a Ph.D. candidate in civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine, highlighted the expectation of more extreme weather in the future, stressing that densely populated areas, particularly those with vulnerable populations, will suffer significantly from urban flooding.
“Currently, detailed global flood modeling is unfeasible for many cities due to insufficient data, so our research team aimed to establish a new perspective on flood risk rooted in urban design,” she mentioned.
Brett Sanders, a Chancellor’s Professor at UC Irvine specializing in civil and environmental engineering, along with urban planning and public policy, stated that the establishment of the new formula was enabled by conducting thousands of flood simulations across various urban configurations, all based on the fundamental laws of physics.
“We generated a dataset detailing flood depth and speed for diverse city layouts found worldwide and used data analysis methods to extract a relatively straightforward formula useful for global planning and vulnerability assessments,” Sanders commented. “Moreover, this equation can be integrated into our educational programs, equipping the future generation of civil engineers to foresee how land development can affect flood risks.”
This initiative received funding from UC Irvine’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education.
