Environmental and Water Resources Engineering Seminar
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Chase Dwelle
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
University of Michigan
Uncertainty and chaos in urban flood modeling
Wednesday, February 24, 2016, 5 – 5:30 PM
1670 Beyster Building (North Campus), University of Michigan
Abstract: Each year floods affect nearly 250 million people, exceed $90 billion in economic losses, and
pose public health risks to developed and developing cities. In order to better assess risks, models of
flooding that rely on modern information about urban environments are needed. With recent advances in
sensing technologies, flood modeling has moved from a data poor to data rich environment, but
leveraging this new information for modeling poses challenges for efficient computation of flood events.
By leveraging uncertainty
quantification through
polynomial chaos expansions,
this research offers a way to
assess risks in a probabilistic
manner while still accounting
for the physics of the studied
environmental system.