Abstract
This study investigates the impact of spatial resolution on urban
pluvial flood modelling, focusing on the implications of high-resolution
topography data for flood inundation mapping. We employed the
physically-based urban flood model, H12, to simulate a past pluvial
flooding event that occurred from 6-8 December 2015 in a sub-watershed
in Portland, Oregon. We compared the temporal evolution of inundation
maps from a benchmark 1 m resolution model with those from coarser
resolutions (ranging from 2 m to 50 m). We evaluated the accuracy of the
modelling results using water depth error measures and grid-based
inundation extent error metrics to investigate the main causes of the
differences. Our results show that the accumulated inundated water
volume significantly increases with coarser grid resolutions, leading to
larger discrepancies in pluvial flood inundation maps across the
modelling domain. Additionally, coarser-resolution grids result in the
overprediction of inundation extents, except in the 2 m model. Accuracy
metrics decrease with coarser modelling grid resolutions; the hit rate
(H) and critical success index (C) both decline as resolution coarsens.
Notably, H rapidly drops below 0.7 and C to 0.5 or less when the
resolution exceeds 7 m. Furthermore, multi-directional flow path
analyses reveal that the spatial ranges of inundation expand as grid
resolution becomes coarser. On the other hand, computational efficiency
improves as grid resolutions become coarser. One of the main causes of
accuracy degradation is the inherent limitation of coarse-resolution
data in depicting topographical details. Although there is no single
optimal resolution that suits all urban conditions, it is important to
note that grid resolutions must be fine enough to accurately represent
major urban features, such as road networks, which affect water flows
during flood events.