Urban flooding and inundation are a severe and inescapable problem for many cities worldwide.
However, both the spatial scale of these processes and the underlying causes differ significantly. Most cities in the industrialised part of the world are confronted with small scale issues, often resulting from insufficient capacities of drainage systems during intense rain. On the other hand, cities in the developing world experience more severe problems. These can usually be traced back to lower sewer standards and significantly more rainfall. Such conditions illustrate that accurate simulations of urban hydrological processes are required to predict potential flood threats and to improve the designs of sewer infrastructure efficiently.
It is, therefore, important to dynamically model rainfall runoff in urban areas. This is done by coupling a 2D hydrologic overland model with a 1D hydraulic flow model, using the two software packages of DHI – MIKE URBAN and MIKE FLOOD. The overall work is split into three stages, comprising the concept, the method, and the actual application.