Urban Flood Modeling: Uncertainty Quantification and Physics‐Informed Gaussian Processes Regression Forecasting
- Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Illinois Urbana‐Champaign Urbana IL USA
- Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg VA USA
- Lyles School of Civil Engineering Purdue University West Lafayette IN USA
- Lynker Boulder CO USA
- Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering University of Cincinnati Cincinnati OH USA
- Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Illinois Urbana‐Champaign Urbana IL USA, Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Richland WA USA
Abstract
Estimating uncertainty in flood model predictions is important for many applications, including risk assessment and flood forecasting. We focus on uncertainty in physics‐based urban flooding models. We consider the effects of the model's complexity and uncertainty in key input parameters. The effect of rainfall intensity on the uncertainty in water depth predictions is also studied. As a test study, we choose the Interconnected Channel and Pond Routing (ICPR) model of a part of the city of Minneapolis. The uncertainty in the ICPR model's predictions of the floodwater depth is quantified in terms of the ensemble variance using the multilevel Monte Carlo (MC) simulation method. Our results show that uncertainties in the studied domain are highly localized. Model simplifications, such as disregarding the groundwater flow, lead to overly confident predictions, that is, predictions that are both less accurate and uncertain than those of the more complex model. We find that for the same number of uncertain parameters, increasing the model resolution reduces uncertainty in the model predictions (and increases the MC method's computational cost). We employ the multilevel MC method to reduce the cost of estimating uncertainty in a high‐resolution ICPR model. Finally, we use the ensemble estimates of the mean and covariance of the flood depth for real‐time flood depth forecasting using the physics‐informed Gaussian process regression method. We show that even with few measurements, the proposed framework results in a more accurate forecast than that provided by the mean prediction of the ICPR model.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- OSTI ID:
- 1963283
- Alternate ID(s):
- OSTI ID: 1983370
- Journal Information:
- Water Resources Research, Journal Name: Water Resources Research Journal Issue: 3 Vol. 59; ISSN 0043-1397
- Publisher:
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English