A Novel Framework for Urban Flood Damage Assessment

The study of non-stationary effects of hydrological time series and land-use changes in urban areas is essential to predict future floods and their probable damage. In the current study, a novel method was proposed for analyzing their simultaneous impact. For this purpose, rainfall frequency and land-use changes analyses were conducted for two different long-term periods, and the results were compared. Then, hydrologic modeling of the catchment was carried out using the HEC-HMS model, and obtained hydrographs were fed to the HEC-RAS2D model for estimating flood inundation areas. Using the economic information of assets and their damage functions, flood damages related to these two periods were evaluated through the HEC-FIA model. The results indicated that in the low return periods (e.g., 2-year flood), the damage in the second period was increased with respect to the first one but increased for the return periods of 5 to 100 years. Furthermore, surface runoff showed a 4.65% increase due to land-use change and a 12% increase due to rainfall non-stationarity. Moreover, flood damage showed a 136% increase on average, and among the two studied factors, the non-stationarity of rainfalls is considerably more effective on flood intensification.