A review of flood modeling methods for urban pluvial flood application

Pluvial flood has been increasingly understood as a major threat that has presented a significant risk for many cities worldwide. Regarding flood risk management, flood modeling enables to understand, assess and forecast flood conditions and their impact. Likewise, several hydrodynamic models have been developed and their application has been spread. With respect to effective flood modeling, particularly in urbanized floodplains, the choice of an appropriate method, considering contextual requirements, is challenging. This paper gives an overview of prevailing flood modeling approaches in view of their potentials and limitations for modeling pluvial flood in urban settings. The existing methods are categorized into: rapid flood spreading, one-dimensional sewer, overland flow (1D and 2D), sewer-surface coupling approaches (1D-1D and 1D-2D). Each of these techniques is described, by taking aspects influencing the selection of a proper flood modeling method for a particular application into account. This paper would help urban flood managers, and potential users undertake effective flood modeling tasks, balancing between their needs, model complexity and requirements of both input data and time.