Identification of Urban Flood Impacts Caused by Land Subsidence and Sea Level Rise for the Houston-Galveston Region

Morgan State University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

In addition to being vulnerable to natural hazards such as hurricanes or tropical storms, many coastal cities also experience significant land subsidence and sea level rise which can exacerbate the urban floods. Although many previous studies have started to realize the significant impacts imposed by land subsidence and sea level rise to coastal communities, incorporating these factors into flood inundation modeling and planning is still a challenge. To address this challenge, this project develops a model to understand and identify the contributing impacts from land subsidence and sea level rise to urban floods. The model will be tested on the Houston-Galveston region using selected extreme events including Hurricane Harvey which occurred in 2017. The goal of the project is to improve U.S. urban flood mitigation and strategic planning to save lives and protect properties from damage and to increase urban sustainability and resilience. The goal of the proposed research is to understand and identify urban flood exacerbated by the contributing impacts from land subsidence and sea level rise. The enhanced hydrologic and hydraulic models will be coupled with a developed land subsidence simulation model and one sea level rise projection model downscaled to the San Jacinto River Basin to identify corresponding flood impacts contributed by land subsidence and sea level rise for the Houston-Galveston region. The proposed methodology assimilates land subsidence and sea level rise scenarios into hydrologic and hydraulic modeling to delineate inundation extents. This method takes advantage of a processed-based distributed hydrologic model to reveal the underpinning of the urban flood exacerbated by land subsidence and sea level rise. The Houston-Galveston region is selected as the test-bed for the proposed project, a historical land subsidence zone that has subsided up to 10 ft. since 1940s and where sea level rise is projected to rise another 1 to 4 ft. by 2100. The research results will advance current knowledge on interactions among atmospheric, hydrological and geological systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.