A qualitative approach for identifying areas prone to urban floods with the support of LiDAR

Abstarct

In urban areas, the land surface is often covered with impervious layers increasing the potential for storm water flooding. Thus, runoff water management during intensive rain events has become an important issue to be tackled in fast-growing cities with increasingly large populations. This paper presents a LiDAR-aided qualitative methodology for defining areas prone to urban floods on a regional scale at the early phases of land use planning. The developed methodology is based on different datasets describing water infiltration capacity of the ground and tested in the city of Vantaa, Finland. The methodology utilizes datasets that are freely and easily available. The selected factors for analysis are soil permeability, soil sealing and surface topography. The presented approach gives tools for the preliminary identification of areas prone to storm water flooding. The developed analysis is user-friendly and quick to perform. It is a qualitative method that can support land use planners and other municipal and regional actors in the environmental and technical sectors in early-phase storm water flood management. The developed method is applicable for different planning scales.

Keywords:

• urban flood
• LiDAR
• GIS
• modelling
• elevation model
• Quaternary geology
• soil sealing

Acknowledgements

This approach was developed in the framework of the South-East Finland – Russia ENPI CBC 2007–2013 Programme project (2011–033-SE497) ”Climate Proof Living Environment (CliPLivE)”. The authors would like to thank all the project partners for their contribution to the project. Mr Mikko Pusa from Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority (HSY) provided valuable comments to the methodology development. The authors would also like to thank the city of Vantaa for providing information and data on storm water management in the city. Dr Philipp Schmidt-Thomé and Dr Mark Johnson provided valuable improvements to the manuscript. Two anonymous referees greatly helped to improve the content and focus of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).