Search results for "flooding"

Pluvial flooding in urban areas: the role of surface drainage efficiency

2016

The impact of climate change on extreme precipitation in Sicily, Italy

2018

Increasing precipitation extremes are one of the possible consequences of a warmer climate. These may exceed the capacity of urban drainage systems, and thus impact the urban environment. Because short-duration precipitation events are primarily responsible for flooding in urban systems, it is important to assess the response of extreme precipitation at hourly (or sub-hourly) scales to a warming climate. This study aims to evaluate the projected changes in extreme rainfall events across the region of Sicily (Italy) and, for two urban areas, to assess possible changes in Depth-Duration-Frequency (DDF) curves. We used Regional Climate Model outputs from Coordinated Regional Climate Downscalin…

Derivation of Rainfall Thresholds for Flash Flood Warning in a Sicilian Basin Using a Hydrological Model

2016

Abstract The damages caused by flash floods are among the most onerous in terms of loss of lives and damage to properties. Derivation of rainfall threshold is one of the approaches commonly used for the development of flash flood warning systems. Specifically, rainfall threshold is the rainfall amount that, for a given basin area and duration, is enough to cause flooding and, therefore, it indicates the maximal sustainable rainfall for a basin. The aim of this paper is deriving flash flood-rainfall thresholds for a Sicilian basin (Italy) throughout a deterministic approach. The conceptual hydrological model TOPDM was used to estimate the amount of rainfall that, for given duration, hydrolog…

Flood frequency analysis for an urban watershed: comparison between several statistical methodologies simulating synthetic rainfall events

2016

To obtain the flooding frequency distribution for an urban watershed, different methods based on simulations of synthetic rainfall events were compared with an empirical analysis of the flooding data and with the results of long-term simulations. A copula-based multivariate statistical analysis of the main hydrological variables was proposed to generate synthetic hyetographs. Two different approaches were adopted to assess a temporal pattern to the synthetic rainfall: one analyses all available historical rainfall patterns, and another adopts the cluster analysis in three different variants to reduce the computational effort of the analysis. To test the methodology reliability, the analysis…

Coarse-Grained Barrier Trees of Fitness Landscapes

2016

Recent literature suggests that local optima in fitness landscapes are clustered, which offers an explanation of why perturbation-based metaheuristics often fail to find the global optimum: they become trapped in a sub-optimal cluster. We introduce a method to extract and visualize the global organization of these clusters in form of a barrier tree. Barrier trees have been used to visualize the barriers between local optima basins in fitness landscapes. Our method computes a more coarsely grained tree to reveal the barriers between clusters of local optima. The core element is a new variant of the flooding algorithm, applicable to local optima networks, a compressed representation of fitnes…

Pluvial flooding in urban areas: the role of surface drainage efficiency

2018

Pluvial flooding in urban areas may derive from the limited or temporarily reduced efficiency of surface drainage, even when the underlying storm sewers are properly designed. This study focuses on the impact of uncertainties in the operational condition of the surface drainage system on pluvial flood hazard. The flood propagation model FLURB-2D is implemented on a selected study area in the town of Genoa (Italy). Synthetic hyetographs based on the Chicago and bivariate copula methods with suitable return periods are used as input. While simulating the design rainfall, inlet operational conditions are varied stochastically using a Monte Carlo approach. Results confirm that microtopography h…

An efficient adaptive strategy for searching in peer-to-peer networks

2005

One of the main technical challenges in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks is how to efficiently locate desired resources. Although structured systems, based on distributed hash tables, can achieve fair effectiveness, they are not suitable for widely deployed Internet applications. In fact, this kind of systems shows many severe limitations, such as ignoring the autonomous nature of peers, and supporting only weakly semantic functions. Unstructured P2P networks are more attractive for real applications, since they can avoid both the limitations of centralized systems, and the drawbacks of structured approaches. However, their search algorithms are usually based on inefficient flooding schemes, tha…

Primary identities in the lower Omo valley: migration, cataclysm, conflict and amalgamation, 1750–1910

2011

This article applies the notion of primary identity to explore the emergence of ethnic identities in the southern-most tract of the lower Omo valley. Current identities here are the result of two correlated patterns of movement that have occurred over the past 150 years: migration to the valley by organised pastoralists and scattered groups, and a general movement down the river and into the Omo delta, where the ecological niche generated by the regular flooding of the Omo River provided a rich variety of livelihood alternatives. The major migrations reported here were connected to great population movements that occurred in East Africa from the nineteenth century, often provoked by catacly…

Educate to coexist with the flood risk

2020

In the Mediterranean region, floods are the main natural risk. This hazard has been aggravated in recent decades by the increase in exposure of the human being and is expected to increase the danger according to the forecast of climate change scenarios. For this reason, dealing with these issues in the classroom and the training of teachers on this subject should be a priority, as established in the curriculum of Primary Education (Social Sciences). The objectives of this research are: 1) To analyze the knowledge that future teachers have about the risk of flooding to develop these contents in the classroom; 2) Check the relevance that they give to this social-environmental problem; and 3) …

Tsunami Vulnerability Evaluation for a Small Ancient Village on Eastern Sicily Coast

2022

The Ionian sea is prone to tsunamis due to its proximity to the Calabrian subduction zone, which is one of the major tsunamigenic areas of the Mediterranean. The tsunami disaster risk is, nowadays, significantly higher due to the increased exposure of buildings as a result of the economic and touristic growth of the Mediterranean coastal areas. This study focuses on Marzamemi, a small village in the western coast of Sicily, since its morphology and human presence amplify the need to assess its buildings’ vulnerability. The main objective of this research is to quantify the building vulnerability to tsunami hazards using a physical and realistic tsunami scenario. For this purpose, the relati…