The Value of Urban Flood Modeling

Floods are important disturbances to urban socio-eco-technical systems and their meteorological drivers are projected to increase through the century due to global climate change. Urban flood models are numerical models that have the capability of representing the features of urban ecosystems and the mechanisms of flooding that impact them. They have the potential to play a critical role in flood risk assessment, operational response, and resilience planning, but existing models remain limited in their capability to represent integrated flooding processes in urban areas and provide the credible quantitative information needed to support risk assessment and resilience practice. Research to advance model development, facilitate intensive watershed monitoring for model parameterization and validation, and support collaboration between researchers and practitioners should be prioritized. This will represent a substantial, expensive effort, but will still be of great value as cities are faced with urgent challenges posed by climate change in coming decades

Advancing Cyberinfrastructure for Collaborative Data Sharing and Modeling in Hydrology

Hydrologic research is increasingly data and computationally intensive, and often involves hydrologic model simulation and collaboration among researchers. With the development of cyberinfrastructure, researchers are able to improve the efficiency, impact, and effectiveness of their research by utilizing online data sharing and hydrologic modeling functionality. However, further efforts are still in need to improve the capability of cyberinfrastructure to serve the hydrologic science community. This dissertation first presents the evaluation of a physically based snowmelt model as an alternative to a temperature index model to improve operational water supply forecasts in the Colorado River Basin. Then it presents the design of the functionality to share multidimensional space-time data in the HydroShare hydrologic information system. It then describes a web application developed to facilitate input preparation and model execution of a snowmelt model and the storage of these results in HydroShare. The snowmelt model evaluation provided use cases to evaluate the cyberinfrastructure elements developed. This research explored a new approach to advance operational water supply forecasts and provided potential solutions for the challenges associated with the design and implementation of cyberinfrastructure for hydrologic data sharing and modeling