About Me

Senior researcher (tenured)

ResearcherID: F-5292-2012

Scopus author ID: 34870089600

ORCID: 0000-0002-7371-0543

Google Scholar

Adjunct Professor at ETH Zurich (Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatics engineering)

Infrastructure Systems in Urban Water and Urban Drainage Planning and Modelling courses in the Master in Environmental Engineering

Water module (with Prof Peter Molnar, ETHZ) in the Master of Landscape Architecture

Climate-adapted water management: dealing with surface runoff and utilising blue-green infrastructures lecture (with Ms Silvia Opliger, VSA) in the CAS Natural Hazard - Risk Management

Research interests

My research involves the development of new methods to improve urban hydrology/ hydraulic modelling accuracy, taking advantage of newly available data resources: (i) identify urban water systems features (e.g. sewer inlets and manholes) from aerial imagery obtained using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and (ii) estimate flow velocity and surface water depth from videos acquired from urban surveillance cameras and social media images, respectively.

I am also interested in the development of urban flood models to more realistically assess urban flood risk. This focus on the development of improvement of one-dimensional (1D) overland flow models and development of novel data-driven flood models. The ultimate goal is to investigate fast but accurate models targeted to be used in real-time flood forecasting applications.

More recently, I have been exploring the potential of urban water to mitigate heat wave impacts in cities. Urban water is essential to sustain urban greenery and can also be a resource to increase evaporative cooling when used to actively water impervious pavements. 

In addition, I am also investigating Infrastructure Asset Management methods aiming at improving the industry’s perennial need for more efficient infrastructure, including blue-green infrastructure, geared to reducing costs and risks while increasing its performance and flexibility.

Recent publications

Salliou, N., Urech, P., Leitão, J.P., Fappiano, F., Grêt-Regamey. A. (2025). Managing urban water requires creative and evidence-based design. Nature Water. doi: 10.1038/s44221-025-00486-9

Farfán-Durán, J.F., Montalvo, C., Cea, L., Leitão, J.P. (2025). Integrating net rainfall calculation in Deep Learning-based surrogate modelling frameworks for urban flood prediction. Journal of Hydrology, 661(C), 133632. doi: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2025.133632

Gobatti, L., Bach, P.M., Maurer, M., Leitão, J.P. (2025). Impact of soil moisture content on urban tree evaporative cooling and human thermal comfort. npj Urban Sustainability, 5, 26. doi: 10.1038/s42949-025-00220-0

Chen, J., Bach, P.M., Leitão, J.P. (2025). A pavement watering model in the TARGET microclimate model to enable city-wide planning of heat mitigation measures. Sustainable Cities and Society. doi: 10.1016/j.scs.2025.106313

Guo, Z., Leitão, J.P. (2025). Creating flood safe urban landscape designs using differentiable surrogate flood models. Blue-Green Systems. doi: 10.2166/bgs.2025.042

Joshi, P., Naves, J., Anta, J., Maurer, M., Leitão, J.P. (2025). Dataset on the impacts of sand and leaf litter on the hydrological performance of green roofs as surrogate for infiltration-based blue-green infrastructure (BGI). Data in Brief, 59, 111337. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2025.111337

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