He climate change It’s not just the heat waves. It’s all extreme weather conditions are growing and will continue to do so, so you can expect there to be a lot of them. floods in places where they were not so common before. Can these floods be predicted in the long term?
The quick answer is no. It is impossible to predict in advance whether a city will experience a major flood. However, it is possible to know that flood risktaking into account both the climate and the shape of the buildings and streets in the area.
There are basic things, for example build buildings on Las Ramblaswhich can significantly increase the risk of flooding. This is already taken into account by some city planners, although in many cases the desire to build more and more buildings makes construction companies forget about the risk. But things like street congestion and the space between buildings can also greatly affect the risk of flooding, but this has not been taken into account until now.
Therefore, a group of scientists from University of California, Irvine developed a formula aimed at calculating these probabilities so that urban engineers could design in advance the best configuration to prevent buildings from being damaged by water.
Cities against floods
It is logical that the presence of a nearby river or reservoir is a key factor in predicting the likelihood of flooding in a given era. It is also necessary to take into account climate modelsBut there may be many other factors, such as the density of development and a more or less disordered street network.
To conduct this study, the authors conducted thousands of computer simulations with different urban conformations based on the laws of physics. First of all, they took into account hydrodynamics to observe what the consequences of a strong storm would be.
Once all these simulations were done, they used the results to develop formula based on mechanical statistics.
This is not a simple formula.
In fact, in this study we describe various formulassince each of them requires parameters obtained from other previous formulas.
In general, factors such as building density, conformation square or hexagonal, corner between buildings or degree of disorder. Are complex formulaswhich require some knowledge of mathematics and physics, but all of them can be seen at this link.
The idea of the study’s authors is that taught at universities. This way, future architects and civil engineers will be able to take this into account. They also hope that those who have already received the degree will learn how to build new buildings so that the city does not suffer.
Floods will become more frequent as climate change progresses. So these calculations may not have been necessary in the past, but they will be important now. Even if your city is flooded right now, there is still time to try to fix it.
Source: Hiper Textual
