Modelling of Urban Flooding—Breakthrough or Recycling of Outdated Concepts

Conventional urban drainage models deal with rainfall-runoff analysis under the effects of local storms. Additionally, urban areas are also vulnerable to local floods caused by surface flows of the anthropogenic origin (main bursts for example) which also need to be modelled. In most of the cases commercially available models are relatively reliable when dealing with free surface and pipe flow separately. However, when the system becomes surcharged, reliability of models becomes strongly dependent on the quality of modelling the interactions between surface and underground sub-systems. At present, the systems for modelling these interactions reliably as a part of urban flooding analysis do not seem to exist. The paper addresses this problem, presents some results of the ongoing research in development of a methodology for such modelling, placing an emphasis on data pre-processing and points out the future research needs in the area.