Balaian Sarah K, Sanders Brett F, Abdolhosseini Qomi Mohammad Javad
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.
Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA.
Nat Commun. 2024 Aug 19;15(1):6911. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-50347-4.
Urbanization and climate change are contributing to severe flooding globally, damaging infrastructure, disrupting economies, and undermining human well-being. Approaches to make cities more resilient to floods are emerging, notably with the design of flood-resilient structures, but relatively little is known about the role of urban form and its complexity in the concentration of flooding. We leverage statistical mechanics to reduce the complexity of urban flooding and develop a mean-flow theory that relates flood hazards to urban form characterized by the ground slope, urban porosity, and the Mermin order parameter which measures symmetry in building arrangements. The mean-flow theory presents a dimensionless flood depth that scales linearly with the urban porosity and the order parameter, with different scaling for disordered square- and hexagon-like forms. A universal scaling is obtained by introducing an effective mean chord length representative of the unobstructed downslope travel distance for flood water, yielding an analytical model for neighborhood-scale flood hazards globally. The proposed mean-flow theory is applied to probe city-to-city variations in flood hazards, and shows promising results linking recorded flood losses to urban form and observed rainfall extremes.
城市化和气候变化正导致全球范围内的严重洪灾,破坏基础设施、扰乱经济并损害人类福祉。使城市更具抗洪能力的方法正在涌现,特别是通过设计抗洪结构,但对于城市形态及其复杂性在洪水集中方面所起的作用,人们了解得相对较少。我们利用统计力学来降低城市洪水的复杂性,并开发了一种平均流理论,该理论将洪水灾害与以地面坡度、城市孔隙率以及测量建筑物布局对称性的默明有序参数为特征的城市形态联系起来。平均流理论提出了一个无量纲洪水深度,它与城市孔隙率和有序参数呈线性比例关系,对于无序的方形和六边形等形态有不同的比例关系。通过引入一个有效的平均弦长来获得通用比例关系,该弦长代表洪水在无障碍下坡方向的行进距离,从而得到一个适用于全球邻里尺度洪水灾害的分析模型。所提出的平均流理论被用于探究城市间洪水灾害的差异,并显示出将记录的洪水损失与城市形态以及观测到的极端降雨联系起来的有前景的结果。