In a response to increased and more hazardous flood events in recent years, Dr. Brett Sanders, Blum Center flood risk researcher, and several co-authors published a commentary article in the journal Earth’s Future, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, to talk about how to improve risk predictions. Historically, scientists and risk analysts have relied on what is called a “bathtub model” of flooding which assumes the waters behave as they would in a level pool, remaining horizontal and level. In the article, Sanders et al explain the limitations of bathtub modeling and demonstrate how it fails to capture important nuance in urban and coastal landscapes which leads to inaccurate estimates of flood risk.  In place of the more simplistic and inaccurate bathtub models, Dr. Sanders offers up physics based models for flood risk modeling.

Sanders and co-authors explain how these improved models would not only have higher accuracy but also why that is important for understanding risk and making policy-related decisions. They argue that “Continued use of level pool approximations in flood risk research introduces unacceptable levels of uncertainty in the form of bias and threatens the credibility of climate change science among policy makers and the public.”

Read the full article in AGU’s Earth’s Future

This commentary article was also reviewed in UCI News or on Phys.org