Modelling and Forecasting Processes in Urban Environments: Particularly in the UK and China

The modelling and forecasting of the impact of extreme rainfall events in urban environments is becoming increasingly challenging as historical tools have been found to need refinement to acquire improved flood risk predictions for river and coastal basins. This article discusses some of the key challenges faced by flood modellers addressing the growing effects of climate change, with the key findings reported in this article being that (i) improved flood models are needed for accurately predicting extreme flood elevations and inundation extents through the inclusion of shock-capturing algorithms; (ii) improved flood hazard risk formulae are need to predict the stability and vulnerability of vehicles and people in extreme flood events; and (iii) assessing the impact of floods on water quality in river and coastal basins can only be delivered accurately when storm events are modelled holistically from the source to sea (S2S), with a systems-based approach to dynamically integrate surface and sub-surface flows etc.