Integrating powerful machine learning models with flood risk assessment and determining the potential mechanism between risk and the driving factors are crucial for improving flood management. In this study, six machine learning models were utilized for flood risk assessment of the Pearl River Delta, in which the Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models were firstly applied in this field. Twelve indices were chosen and 2000 sample points were created for model training and testing. Hyperparameter optimization of the models was conducted to ensure fair comparisons. Due to uncertainty in the sample dataset, recorded inundation hot-spots were utilized to validate the rationality of the flood risk zoning maps. After determining the optimal model, the driving factors of different flood risk levels were investigated. Urban and rural areas and coastal and inland areas were also compared to determine the flood risk mechanism in different highest-risk areas. The results showed that the GBDT performed best and provided the most reasonable flood risk result among the six models. A comparison of the driving factors at different risk levels indicated that the disaster-inducing factor, disaster-breeding environment, and disaster-bearing body were not definitely becoming more serious as the flood risk increased. In the highest-risk areas, rural areas were featured by worse disaster-breeding environment than urban areas, and the disaster-inducing factors of coastal areas were more serious than those of inland areas. Moreover, the Digital Elevation Model (DEM), maximum 1-day precipitation (M1DP), and road density (RD) were the top three significant driving factors and contributed 52% to flood risk. This study not only expands the application of machine learning and deep learning methods for flood risk assessment, but also deepens our understanding of the potential mechanism of flood risk and provides insights into better flood risk management.

Floods occur frequently and cause considerable damage to local environments. Effectively assessing the flood risk contributes to reducing loss caused by such disasters. In this study, the weighted naïve Bayes (WNB) method was selected to evaluate flood risk, and the entropy weight method was employed to compute the weights. A sampling and verifying model was employed to generate the most accurate conditional probability table (MACPT) to calculate the probability of flooding. When using the framework integrating WNB with the sampling and verifying model, previous studies could not obtain a WNB-based MACPT and the WNB classification accuracy, for lacking WNB functions that could be called directly. Facing this issue, in this study we developed WNB functions with the MATLAB platform to directly integrate with the sampling and verifying model to generate a WNB-based MACPT, contributing to the greater interpretability and extensibility of the model. Shantou and Jieyang cities in China were selected as the study area. The results demonstrate that: (1) a WNB-based MACPT can reflect the real spatial distribution of flood risk and (2) the WNB outperform the NB when integrated with the sampling and verifying model. The resulting gridded estimation reveal a detailed spatial pattern of flood risk, which can serve as a realistic reference for decision making related to floods. Furthermore, the proposed method uses less data, which would be helpful in developing countries where long-term intensive hydrologic monitoring is limited.

Due to the influence of buildings on the distribution of flood and their economic and social attributes, 3D spatial information such as the size of buildings and the flooded ratio of buildings relative to their height has an increasing impact on urban flood risk. However, existing flood risk assessment methods mainly use data in 2D and analysis methods are mostly 2D. In this study, flood variation processes were analyzed in the form of 3D dynamic visualization by coupling an urban drainage model and a flood simulation model with 3D visualization methods. By further combining with 3D building models, the 3D spatial information of buildings related to flood was obtained. In order to study the influence of 3D information on flood risk and combine with other multi-source heterogeneous data for integrated analysis, a 3D visualization assessment and analysis method for flood risk, coupled with the projection pursuit-particle swarm optimization algorithm (PP-PSO) was established (3DVAAM-PP-PSO). A case study from Chaohu City, China, was used to demonstrate the method. The results showed that the PP-PSO algorithm can process high-dimensional information and obtain the objective weight of each index. The 3D information from the influenced buildings had an impact on the evaluation results, which needed to be considered. Through the 3D visualization analysis, the overall distribution of flood risk and that around the buildings were obtained in multi-perspectives. The flood risk during different rainfall return periods were analyzed intuitively and comparatively. This study furnishes a novel method for flood risk assessment and analysis by making the most of 3D spatial information.

Pluvial flash floods in urban areas are becoming increasingly frequent due to climate change and human actions, negatively impacting the life, work, production and infrastructure of a population. Pluvial flooding occurs when intense rainfall overflows the limits of urban drainage and water accumulation causes hazardous flash floods. Although flash floods are hard to predict given their rapid formation, Early Warning Systems (EWS) are used to minimize casualties. We performed a systematic review to define the basic structure of an EWS for rain flash floods. The structure of the review is as follows: first, Section 2 describes the most important factors that affect the intensity of pluvial flash floods during rainfall events. Section 3 defines the key elements and actors involved in an effective EWS. Section 4 reviews different EWS architectures for pluvial flash floods implemented worldwide. It was identified that the reviewed projects did not follow guidelines to design early warning systems, neglecting important aspects that must be taken into account in their implementation. Therefore, this manuscript proposes a basic structure for an effective EWS for pluvial flash floods that guarantees the forecasting process and alerts dissemination during rainfall events.

Metro system is a vital component of mass transportation infrastructure, providing crucial social and economic service in urban area. Flood events may cause functional disruptions to metro systems; therefore, a better understanding of their vulnerability would enhance their resilience. A comparative study of flood risk in metro systems is presented using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the interval AHP (I-AHP) methods. The flood risk in the Guangzhou metro system is evaluated according to recorded data. Evaluated results are validated using the flood event occurred in Guangzhou on May 10, 2016 (hereinafter called \"May 10th event\"), which inundated several metro stations. The flood risk is assessed within a range of 500 m around the metro line. The results show that >50% of metro lines are highly exposed to flood risk, indicating that the Guangzhou metro system is vulnerable to flood events. Comparisons between results from AHP and I-AHP show that the latter yields a wider range of high flooding risk than the former.

Cash crops are agricultural crops intended to be sold for profit as opposed to subsistence crops, meant to support the producer, or to support livestock. Since cash crops are intended for future sale, they translate into large financial value when considered on a wide geographical scale, so their production directly involves financial risk. At a national level, extreme weather events including destructive rain or hail, as well as drought, can have a significant impact on the overall economic balance. It is thus important to map such crops in order to set up insurance and mitigation strategies. Using locally generated data-such as municipality-level records of crop seeding-for mapping purposes implies facing a series of issues like data availability, quality, homogeneity, etc. We thus opted for a different approach relying on global datasets. Global datasets ensure homogeneity and availability of data, although sometimes at the expense of precision and accuracy. A typical global approach makes use of spaceborne remote sensing, for which different land cover classification strategies are available in literature at different levels of cost and accuracy. We selected the optimal strategy in the perspective of a global processing chain. Thanks to a specifically developed strategy for fusing unsupervised classification results with environmental constraints and other geospatial inputs including ground-based data, we managed to obtain good classification results despite the constraints placed. The overall production process was composed using \"good-enough\" algorithms at each step, ensuring that the precision, accuracy, and data-hunger of each algorithm was commensurate to the precision, accuracy, and amount of data available. This paper describes the tailored strategy developed on the occasion as a cooperation among different groups with diverse backgrounds, a strategy which is believed to be profitably reusable in other, similar contexts. The paper presents the problem, the constraints and the adopted solutions; it then summarizes the main findings including that efforts and costs can be saved on the side of Earth Observation data processing when additional ground-based data are available to support the mapping task.

In this article, the use of time series of satellite imagery to flood hazard mapping and flood risk assessment is presented. Flooded areas are extracted from satellite images for the flood-prone territory, and a maximum flood extent image for each flood event is produced. These maps are further fused to determine relative frequency of inundation (RFI). The study shows that RFI values and relative water depth exhibit the same probabilistic distribution, which is confirmed by Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The produced RFI map can be used as a flood hazard map, especially in cases when flood modeling is complicated by lack of available data and high uncertainties. The derived RFI map is further used for flood risk assessment. Efficiency of the presented approach is demonstrated for the Katima Mulilo region (Namibia). A time series of Landsat-5/7 satellite images acquired from 1989 to 2012 is processed to derive RFI map using the presented approach. The following direct damage categories are considered in the study for flood risk assessment: dwelling units, roads, health facilities, and schools. The produced flood risk map shows that the risk is distributed uniformly all over the region. The cities and villages with the highest risk are identified. The proposed approach has minimum data requirements, and RFI maps can be generated rapidly to assist rescuers and decisionmakers in case of emergencies. On the other hand, limitations include: strong dependence on the available data sets, and limitations in simulations with extrapolated water depth values.

A central tool in risk management is the exceedance-probability loss (EPL) curve, which denotes the probabilities of damages being exceeded or equalled. These curves are used for a number of purposes, including the calculation of the expected annual damage (EAD), a common indicator for risk. The model calculations that are used to create such a curve contain uncertainties that accumulate in the end result. As a result, EPL curves and EAD calculations are also surrounded by uncertainties. Knowledge of the magnitude and source of these uncertainties helps to improve assessments and leads to better informed decisions. This study, therefore, performs uncertainty and sensitivity analyses for a dike-ring area in the Netherlands, on the south bank of the river Meuse. In this study, a Monte Carlo framework is used that combines hydraulic boundary conditions, a breach growth model, an inundation model, and a damage model. It encompasses the modelling of thirteen potential breach locations and uncertainties related to probability, duration of the flood wave, height of the flood wave, erodibility of the embankment, damage curves, and the value of assets at risk. The assessment includes uncertainty and sensitivity of risk estimates for each individual location, as well as the dike-ring area as a whole. The results show that for the dike ring in question, EAD estimates exhibit a 90% percentile range from about 8 times lower than the median, up to 4.5 times higher than the median. This level of uncertainty can mainly be attributed to uncertainty in depth-damage curves, uncertainty in the probability of a flood event and the duration of the flood wave. There are considerable differences between breach locations, both in the magnitude of the uncertainty, and in its source. This indicates that local characteristics have a considerable impact on uncertainty and sensitivity of flood damage and risk calculations.