Flood Inundation Mapping and Risk Assessment
Summary
Flood inundation mapping and risk assessment constitute an essential framework for understanding, predicting and managing the spatial extent of floodwaters and associated hazards. These activities integrate hydrological and hydraulic models, geomorphic indices, remote sensing data and socio-economic exposure information to generate spatially explicit inundation extents under varying flood scenarios. Advances in digital elevation models, alongside rapid computational methods, have enabled both high-resolution, event-specific mapping and large-scale screening assessments in data-scarce environments. Flood risk assessment further combines hazard maps with vulnerability and exposure analyses to identify at-risk populations and assets, inform land-use planning, guide emergency response and prioritise mitigation measures. The interplay between model complexity, data availability and operational requirements continues to drive methodological innovation, with the ultimate aim of reducing flood impacts in a changing climate.
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Flood Inundation Mapping and Risk Assessment publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in flood inundation mapping and risk assessment across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Digital Elevation Model (DEM): A gridded representation of ground surface elevations used to derive terrain attributes for flood and hydrological analyses.
Height Above Nearest Drainage (HAND): A terrain index quantifying the vertical distance between each land cell and its nearest stream channel, employed to approximate inundation extents.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR): A satellite-borne active remote sensing technique that provides two-dimensional backscatter imagery, capable of penetrating cloud cover and detecting surface water.
Flood Inundation Mapping (FIM): The process of delineating areas likely to be submerged under specified flood conditions, using empirical, hydraulic or hybrid modelling approaches.
National Water Model (NWM): A large-scale hydrological reanalysis framework that simulates streamflow and hydrodynamic conditions across a continental river network in real time.
References
- Leveraging synthetic assimilation of remote sensing with the National Water Model (NWM) to improve above-normal flow prediction in ungauged basins. Environmental Research Letters (2024).
- Effects of high-quality elevation data and explanatory variables on the accuracy of flood inundation mapping via Height Above Nearest Drainage. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (2024).
- Performance of automated methods for flash flood inundation mapping: a comparison of a digital terrain model (DTM) filling and two hydrodynamic methods. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (2021).
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