UC Irvine

Flood damages around the world have been increasing at a daunting rate, causing extreme socioeconomic harm to entire communities. With the increase in urbanization and population growth, a framework to understanding the effects that the changing urban landscape has on natural conditions such as flooding has become crucial. While many different approaches to modeling urban flooding have been introduced, few have considered the effects of spatial orientation and form of urban areas on flood behavior. Here, we employ a parameter that is commonly used in statistical and molecular science, called an order parameter, to aid in the quantification of urban texture. A hybrid reverse Monte Carlo algorithm is implemented to produce synthetic cities for the purpose of flood modeling; synthetic cities allow for better control of morphology parameters and reduce the number of independent variables that could affect resulting trends. By subsequently inundating these models with different flood possibilities, the results show that there is a connection between the form of the urban layout and resulting flood water heights. The interaction between porosity and spatial order in the resulting flood heights prove that they both should be considered in tandem when studying urban morphology. These results can be used in future flood hazard mitigation and urban planning programs to account for effects of urban layout on flood levels.