Efficient Hazard Assessment for Pluvial Floods in Urban Environments: A Benchmarking Case Study for the City of Berlin, Germany

The presence of impermeable surfaces in urban areas hinders natural drainage and directs the surface runoff to storm systems with finite capacity, which makes these prone pluvial flooding. occurrence flooding depends on existence minimal for generation concentration. Detailed hydrologic hydrodynamic simulations are computationally expensive require intensive resources. This study compared evaluated performance two simplified methods identify flood-prone areas, namely fill–spill–merge (FSM) method topographic wetness index (TWI) used TELEMAC-2D numerical model benchmarking validation. FSM uses common GIS operations depressions from a high-resolution digital elevation (DEM). TWI employs maximum likelihood (MLE) probabilistically calibrate threshold (τ) based inundation maps 2D given spatial window (W) within area. We found that clearly outperforms both conceptually effectively terms performance.