Graduation Semester and Year
Spring 2025
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Civil Engineering
Department
Civil Engineering
First Advisor
Adnan Rajib
Second Advisor
Michelle Hummel
Third Advisor
Xiujuan Chen
Fourth Advisor
Nishan Kumar Biswas
Abstract
Floods, as the most common type of natural disaster globally, cause significant loss of life and economic damage. With the ongoing impact of climate change, both the intensity and frequency of floods are expected to increase substantially, highlighting the need for effective flood risk mitigation strategies to reduce potential losses. Recognizing this challenge, researchers have long sought methods to predict and replicate flood conditions. A widely used approach for this purpose is flood inundation modeling, which has evolved over time. However, despite advancements in flood modeling techniques, their practical application remains limited by high resource demands and the need for specialized technical expertise.
The current flood modeling efforts face the limitations of inefficiency and transparency of their approaches, stemming from multiple factors such as slow processing speed, high costs, modeling prerequisites. These issues result in limited reproducibility, accessibility and interoperability. The first objective of this dissertation attempts to address such challenges by developing SWATFlood as a robust web-based flood inundation mapping tool, by loosely integrating the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) with Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND). Ten distinct regions across the world with scales ranging from 2,635 km2 to 42,636 km2, were selected to evaluate the real-time SWATFlood execution capabilities. It was observed that SWATFlood generated flood maps for all 10 regions within the span of 3 to 13 minutes, highlighting its ability to significantly accelerate the flood modeling process. The promising initial results from SWATFlood suggest that applying this method in scenario-based case studies would significantly enhance its relevance in terms of reproducibility.
The second objective of this dissertation attempts to evaluate the flood reduction capabilities of major and minor reservoirs in Texas. To demonstrate this, seven test beds were established for the Texas Gulf Coast Rivers, representing varying scales, climatic conditions, topography, and geophysical settings. A total of 88 model configurations, addressing two distinct scenarios, were simulated to assess the changes in downstream flooding driven by reservoirs, and examine relationships between several reservoir characteristics and flood mitigation. Our results show that large reservoirs reduce flooding over an area of nearly 300 km², while smaller reservoirs, although having lower storage capacities, also mitigate flooding over approximately 50 km² downstream. This assessment improved the understanding of the flood mitigation potential of existing reservoirs and demonstrated the effectiveness of the SWATFlood application in ensuring reproducibility.
The third objective is to conduct a thorough evaluation of HAND flood maps across multiple scales, diverse reference datasets, and various flood event categories. By comparing the HAND based flood maps generated by SWATFlood with (a) 100-year floodplain reference data, (b) high-water mark-based extent, and (c) remote sensing-derived extent in different regions globally, we observe generally good performance in all cases, with CSI values ranging from 0.41 to 0.56. Furthermore, the evaluation performance is found to be strongly influenced by the quality of the reference data and the input parameters. The development, test application and comprehensive performance evaluation of SWATFlood, and the findings presented in this study indicate SWATFlood as a valuable tool for effective flood risk management, particularly for underserved communities. Additionally, SWATFlood has the potential to bridge the gap between data-scarce and data-rich regions. It also offers an opportunity for collaborative use, enabling researchers, educators, students, and developers worldwide to create an open community that fosters knowledge exchange.
Keywords
Height Above Nearest Drainage, Soil and Water Assessment Tool, Flood Inundation Mapping, Reservoir Flood Reduction
Disciplines
Environmental Engineering
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Patel, Krutikkumar, "DEVELOPING EFFICIENT AND TRANSPARENT FLOOD MAPPING CAPABILITIES" (2025). Civil Engineering Dissertations. 513.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/civilengineering_dissertations/513