It has long been recognized that flood protection provided by levees is a double-edged sword. On one hand, levee systems have provided flood protection. On the other hand, given enough time levees either will be overtopped or will fail—leading to severe flood impacts on an unsuspecting population. Unlike a natural flood, levee failure flooding is often rapid, forceful, extremely damaging, and o...

Floods have profound impacts on populations worldwide in terms of both loss of life and property. A global inventory of floods is an important tool for quantifying the spatial and temporal distribution of floods and for evaluating global flood prediction models. Several global hazard inventories currently exist; however, their utility for spatiotemporal analysis of global floods is limited. The...

A modified flash flood severity assessment is presented, based on scoring a set of factors according to their potential for generating extreme catchment-scale flooding. Improvements are made to the index through incorporation of parameter uncertainties, managing data absence, and clearer graphical communication. The motive for proposing these changes is to better inform flood managers during th...

Green infrastructure approaches have attracted increased attention from local governments as a way to lower flood risk and provide an array of other environmental services. The peer-reviewed literature, however, offers few estimates of the economic impacts of such approaches at the watershed scale. We estimate the avoided flood damages and the costs of preventing development of floodplain parce...

This paper offers a critique of the cordon approach to flood control that Bangladesh has been pursuing for several decades now. It shows how this approach fails to solve the flood problem, deprives the flood plains from benefits of regular river-inundation, creates a risky situation for the inhabitants inside cordons, brings in new problems of drainage and sanitation, and leads to huge waste of...

Flooding is a growing problem, which affects more than 10% of the UK population. The cost of damage caused by flooding correlates closely with the warning time given before a flood event, making flood monitoring and prediction critical to minimizing the cost of flood damage. This paper describes a wireless sensor network for flood warning which is not only capable of integrating with remote fix...

This study used GIS to identify flood risk areas on the proposed Wapuli and Kpalba roads to help policy makers take a firm decision on which road to link Yendi, Saboba, Chereponi and Gushiegu districts in Northern Ghana. The aim was to identify and measure floodable areas on the proposed roads. Factors influencing flooding in the area are identified and reclassified to flood risk values based o...

Flood monitoring technique using adjustable histogram equalization is proposed. The technique overcomes the limitations (overenhancement, artifacts, and unnatural look) of existing technique by adjusting the contrast of images. The proposed technique takes pre- and postimages and applies different processing steps for generating flood map without user interaction. The resultant flood maps can b...