Approximation method for the sewer drainage effect for urban flood modeling in areas without drainage-pipe data

Introduction: The underground drainage-pipe network is one of the vital components of a modern city, and it plays an important role in preventing or mitigating urban flooding. Thus, pipe network data are necessary for simulation of the entire urban rainfall–runoff process. However, pipe network data are sparse or unavailable in most urban areas.

Methods: To solve this problem, we developed a novel approximation method that can be used calculate the drainage capacity of the pipe system. This method is named the road-drainage method, and it works under the assumption that the pipe network functions by subtracting the corresponding mass from the water conservation equation only from areas of road. The mass is determined from weir flow formulas together with the road properties and correction for this mass is applied to the rainfall source term.

Results: Two test cases were used to compare the performance of the new method with an existing method, under which mass is subtracted from the entire area during the rainfall–runoff process. The results showed that the new method considerably improves the accuracy of simulated peak volume, with an improvement of 2.62%–58.75% compared with the existing method across various scenarios. Moreover, the proposed new method reduces the time shift of the rise and peak of surface inundation by 10–45 min in various scenarios, which reflects a more realistic model of the rainfall–runoff process.

Discussion: These results demonstrate that the proposed new method can represent the drainage capability more accurately and is more consistent with reality. The road-drainage method has promising potential for application in urban flood simulation in areas without drainage system data and for the support of large-scale urban hydrologic modeling.