River modelling and flood mitigation in a Belgian catchment

This paper describes the steps followed to propose solutions to recurring flooding problems in a Belgian catchment. Firstly, the hydraulic capacity (maximum discharge before bank overflow) of the cross sections was computed all along the river by an iterative 1D steady-state approach. In order to carry out these simulations, cross sections from on-site surveys of the river were integrated into the model, as well as hydraulic structures such as culverts, footbridges, and pipes. Secondly, the flooding problem was analysed with a time-dependant approach consisting of simulating floods following extreme rainfall events. The hydrological aspect was studied in a spatially distributed way using a multi-layer hydrological model. The available data on the basin such as the digital elevation model (DEM), the landuse, and the pedology were exploited to identify the basic modelling parameters. The hydrological contribution was routed by a 1D network resulting from the merging of the DEM-based and the cross section-based river networks. According to the results of the aforementioned steps, various local and catchment-wide solutions against flooding were proposed and analyzed. The comparison of simulated situations before and after these improvements allowed checking the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.