A coupled high-resolution forecasting model for urban floods

Social media serves as a dynamic platform for real-time information exchange and provides valuable insights across various domains. Limited attention has been given to the validation of flood models using social media. This study focuses on validating the flood inundation maps obtained by coupling WRF with PCSWMM and HEC-RAS (Davis et. al. 2022) with social media information. The coupled model provided the flood forecast over Bangalore city for 3rd-6th September 2022 heavy rainfall event with 14hr lead time . The results showed that the flooding was influenced by densely packed infrastructure, lake breaches, and ineffective drainage systems. Bangalore serves as a test bed for the proposed modelling framework, and its potential application in urban cities allows it to be deployed at different scales, offering solutions for efficient planning, quick response times, and resilient infrastructure. The insights from the framework will allow urban planners to make decisions for effective flood reduction strategies.