Effectiveness of urban distributed runoff model for discharge and water depth calculation in urban drainage pipe networks

Abstract

Effective urban land-use re-planning and the strategic arrangement of drainage pipe networks can significantly enhance urban flood defense capacity. Aimed at reducing the potential risks of urban flooding, this paper presents a straightforward and efficient approach to an urban distributed runoff model (UDRM). The model is developed to quantify the discharge and water depth within urban drainage pipe networks under varying rainfall intensities and land-use scenarios. The Nash efficiency coefficient of UDRM exceeds 0.9, which indicates its high computational efficiency and potential benefit in predicting urban flooding. The prediction of drainage conditions under both current and re-planned land-use types is achieved by adopting different flood recurrence intervals. The findings reveal that the re-planned land-use strategies could effectively diminish flood risk upstream of the drainage pipe network across 20-year and 50-year flood recurrence intervals. However, in the case of extreme rainfall events (a 100-year flood recurrence), the re-planned land-use approach fell short of fulfilling the requirements necessary for flood disaster mitigation. In these instances, the adoption of larger-diameter drainage pipes becomes an essential requisite to satisfy drainage needs. Accordingly, the proposed UDRM effectively combines land-use information with pipeline data to give practical suggestions for pipeline modification and land-use optimization to combat urban floods. Therefore, this methodology warrants further promotion in the field of urban re-planning.