Department Urban Water Management

Pluvial flash floods are a growing hazard to property and inhabitants' well-being in urban areas. However, the lack of appropriate data collection methods is often cited as an impediment for reliable flood modelling, thereby hindering the improvement of flood risk mapping and early warning systems. The potential of surveillance infrastructure and social media is starting to draw attention for this purpose.

In the floodX project, 22 controlled urban flash floods were generated in a flood response training facility and monitored with state-of-the-art sensors as well as standard surveillance cameras. With these data, it is possible to explore the use of video data and computer vision for urban flood monitoring and modelling. The floodX project stands out as the largest documented flood experiment of its kind, providing both conventional measurements and video data in parallel and at high temporal resolution.

Publication: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-9-657-2017.

Data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.830513.

The experiments were conducted at a special facility in a military training village in Wangen an der Aare (Bern, CH). The facility was specifically designed to reproduce urban flood phenomena such as manhole surcharge and basement flooding. Flood events were contained in a 25x25 m area that includes a simple configurable sewer network and a building. Water used for the flooding experiments is stored in a 450 m3 reservoir located 10 meters above the level of the facility.

Moy de Vitry, M., Dicht, S., and Leitão, J. P.: floodX: urban flash flood experiments monitored with conventional and alternative sensors, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 9, 657-666, doi.org/10.5194/essd-9-657-2017, 2017.