Guohan Zhao, IGN, defends his thesis about urban flood modelling

Guohan Zhao defends his thesis,

A Sub-model Approach for fast large-scale high resolution two-dimensional urban flood modelling

Video link

Supervisors:
Professor Marina Bergen Jensen, IGN
Associate Professor Thomas Balstrøm, IGN
Dr. Ole Mark, Krüger A/S

Assessment Committee:
Senior Researcher Albert S. Chen, Univ. of Exeter – UK
Professor MSO Michael R. Rasmussen, Aalborg Universitet
Senior Researcher Hans Skov-Petersen (chair), IGN

Summary:
Guohan Zhao has developed a method for rapid 2D predictions of urban floods, giving promise of future flood forecasting models operating at large scales making use of high-resolution terrain data. The method is based on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and identifies the part of the drainage basin that may cause flooding of a target object (e.g. a city or single building) thus excluding any irrelevant areas. The method returns a reduced number of computational cells to be used in conventional 2D hydrodynamic models. By comparison with a full 2D-modelling of the case basin (the Greve Basin, Denmark), it is demonstrated that the method provides robust performances and accurate predictions, but at a significantly faster computing speed. Included in this method is a new way of distinguishing important sinks (landscape depressions) from unimportant ones based on the characteristics of the predicted rainfalls and the sinks’ volume/catchment ratio.

A digital version of the PhD thesis can be obtained from the PhD secretary Anne Marie Faldt anmf@ign.ku.dk