Operational flood forecasting across the globe is moving towards forecasting the impacts and risks of flooding.
To forecast flood impacts and risk, new modelling approaches to model chains that can solve the new challenges are developed. Some key elements of a flood risk forecasting chain are
- Distributed hydrological models that include river routing
- Detailed hydraulic models that map flooded areas
- Detailed maps of elements at risk
- Procedures/approaches for assessing warning levels
- Ensemble forecasting that allows estimation of the probability of flooding.
The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) has an internal project to develop risk-based flood forecasting, and we invite master students to establish master projects that address the challenges related to reservoir operations during floods.
The thesis aims to develop a tool that can assess how reservoir operations can be used to minimize impacts from floods.
To achieve this aim a distributed hydrological model including reservoirs will be used to calculate streamflow; a hydraulic model will be used to calculate water levels, and impact maps will be used to assess the total impact. For selected past flood events, past weather forecasts will be combined with reservoir operation scenarios to assess the possible impacts and the strategy that minimizes the expected impacts.
Models and datasets are already available: Existing configuration of hydrological model for two study areas, hydraulic model configurations, archives of inundation maps, and impact maps. All these sources could be improved during the master project.
The thesis will require a student skilled in scripting in Python (and/or other tools) and handling large datasets.