Quantifying uncertainty in flood predictions due to river bathymetry estimation

Abstract. River bathymetry is important for accurate flood inundation modelling but is often unavailable due to the time-intensive and expensive nature of its acquisition. This leads to several proposed and implemented approaches for its estimation. However, the errors in estimations inherent in these methods and how they affect the accuracy of the flood inundation modelling outputs, has not been extensively researched. Hence, to contribute, we investigate the sensitivity of flood predictions to the errors in river slope, width, and bank-full flow used in two formulas – the Uniform Flow and the Conceptual Multivariate Regression – for estimating river bathymetry. In this study, we employed a Monte Carlo framework to introduce random errors into these parameters drawn from a normal distribution with zero mean and a standard deviation set to 10 % of their best estimates. Using this process, we generated 50 simulated river bathymetries for each parameter along with an additional 50 where the errors were applied to all parameters simultaneously. The riverbeds generated from these bathymetries were combined with topographic LiDAR data to create model grids. Each grid was used in the hydrodynamic model LISFLOOD-FP to simulate the 2005 flood event in the Waikanae River area of New Zealand. We assessed the resulting flood inundation predictions for their variability and sensitivity. The results indicate that between two methods, the errors in the parameters in the Uniform Flow formula are associated with greater uncertainty in flood inundation depths and extents compared to the Conceptual Multivariate Regression. Among the parameters, the width errors correspond to the highest uncertainty, while the slope errors correspond to the lowest.