FloodAdapt – an adaptation planning tool
FloodAdapt is a decision-support tool that seeks to advance and accelerate flooding-related adaptation planning. It brings rapid, physics-based compound flood modeling and detailed impact modeling into an easy-to-use system, allowing non-expert end-users to evaluate a wide variety of compound events, future conditions, and adaptation options in minutes. FloodAdapt serves as a connector between scientific advances and practitioner needs, improving and increasing the uptake and impact of adaptation research and development.
Why use FloodAdapt?
FloodAdapt can greatly support adaptation planning by allowing users to explore many scenarios. It can be used to evaluate flooding and impacts due to compound weather events, like hurricanes, king tides, and rainfall events.
Users can evaluate flooding, impacts, and risk considering user-specified projections of sea level rise, precipitation increase, storm frequency increase, population growth, and economic growth. Users can also test out adaptation options, like sea walls, levees, pumps, home elevations, buyouts and floodproofing.
Decision-making needs at the community level were central to the design of FloodAdapt. Users can answer planning questions like:
- How will potential adaptation options reduce flood impacts?
- How will those options perform for different types of events, like hurricanes, king tides, or heavy rainfall?
- Which neighborhoods will benefit most?
- How will those options hold up in the future?
How does FloodAdapt work?
FloodAdapt was developed as a rapid planning tool with a straightforward graphical user interface for scenario generation, simulation, and visualisation of spatial flooding and flooding impacts.
Users specify what-if scenarios composed of historic or synthetic weather events, climate or socio-economic future projections, and adaptation measures. The backend of FloodAdapt leverages the open-source, state-of-the-art process-based compound flood model SFINCS that can accurately predict compound flooding due to surge, rainfall, and river discharge. At a fraction of the computation time typically required by physics-based models.
The damage model included in FloodAdapt is the Deltares-developed flood impact assessment tool Delft-FIAT. It calculates the flood damages to individual buildings and roads, and – when social vulnerability data is available – aggregates these damages over vulnerability classes.
Ongoing developments
Ongoing developments of the decision-support system include:
- simplifying and partially automating the setup of the SFINCS and Delft-FIAT models,
- improving the user experience,
- better supporting adaptation planning with improvements like metrics tables, infographics, better visualizations in the user interface, adding in additional adaptation options to evaluate, and calculating benefits of adaptation options, and
- incorporating social vulnerability and equity into the evaluation of adaptation options to support equitable adaptation planning.
