Advanced and Reliable Models for Natural and Man- Made Hazards - 1st version

PLOTO project aims at increasing the resilience of the Inland WaterWays (IWW) infrastructures and the connected hinterland- infrastructures, thus ensuring reliable network availability under unfavourable conditions, such as extreme weather, droughts and floods, as well as other kinds of hazards. PLOTO’s main target is to combine downscaled climate change scenarios (applied to IWW infrastructures) with simulation tools and actual data, so as to provide the relevant authorities and their operators with an integrated tool able to support more effective management of their infrastructures at strategic and operational levels. The PLOTO integrated platform and its tools will be validated in three case studies in Belgium, Romania, and Hungary.
This deliverable is the 1st version of the “Advanced and Reliable Models for Natural and Man-Made Hazards” and is an outcome of Task T4.1 “Hazards Models and Tools”. It contributes to achieving STO-2 (Reliable quantification of climatic, hydrological and atmospheric stressors) of the project. The Deliverable is essentially structured in three parts: (a) weather hazard modelling, (b) hydrological hazard modelling with a focus on floods and flood-induced dyke breaching, as well as (c) seismic hazard. The document outlines the main modelling techniques developed within PLOTO and their application to the use cases.
Weather hazards are examined based on accurate downscaling of large-scale climate and weather data to small scales at a high resolution, building upon results from Regional Climate Models (RCM) obtained from the EUROCORDEX database. Short-term forecasts will also be produced by downscaling Numerical Weather Prediction model (NWP) data. Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of wind will provide information on mean wind and gusts, which are of relevance for assessing effects of wind on vessels manoeuvrability, wave-induced overtopping of dykes, and loading/unloading operations in ports using cranes.
For flood hazard, a complete modelling chain is being set up, going all the way from precipitation data to flow rate computation by hydrological analysis, and inundation mapping based on hydraulic simulations. A machine-learning based hydrological assessment tool has been developed for estimating flow rates in a computationally efficient manner. Modelling dyke breaching and induced flooding will be based on a twofold computational approach which combines detailed flow simulations with quick, simplified models suitable for operational purpose.
For seismic hazard analysis, probabilistic approaches (PSHA) were preferred over scenario-based techniques. Though more computationally demanding, they enable better considering uncertainties on inputs such as earthquake source. Both seismicity on faults and distributed seismicity are accounted for in the considered source models. Three different approaches were utilized: Classical PSHA, Event-based PSHA, and Disaggregation analysis. Their application to the use cases is outlined in the report, together with intermediate results.
Final results delivered by the hazard modelling approaches will be provided in the 2nd version of this Deliverable, due in M24.